Joseph: “What they [the DHS] call situational awareness is Orwellian speak for watching and intimidation,” said Azmy. “Over time there’s a serious harm to the associational rights of the protesters and it’s an effective way to chill protest movements.
Taibbi: After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the solution to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the black community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson – the same guy who called Brown a "demon" – insisted that Brown would still be alive "if he'd just followed orders."
From article: “Authentic justice and liberation will only come when there is authentic de-colonization and revolutionary power in the hands of self-determinate peoples' and oppressed classes and social groups.”
Giroux: We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system.
Hedges: If things unravel [in the U.S.], our backlash may very well be a rightwing backlash — a very frightening rightwing backlash. We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources.
Hedges: There is a word for what is bubbling up from below—revolution. It can’t begin soon enough.
From the article: You'd never know it from the media's Gotham-esque portrayal of a city riddled with criminals and "thugs," but on Monday night Baltimore was also a story of good Samaritans trying to disperse emotional crowds. It was a story of everyday citizens determined to dissipate tensions between protesters and police, of ordinary folks cleaning up their city while the media turned its cameras away. And it was a story of determined advocates for racial equality holding a meaningful dialogue with police on the streets.
Kolhatkar: As a recent Time magazine cover story illustrates, the Black Lives Matter movement has successfully shaped the mainstream narrative of the reality of police violence against African-Americans. But most of the discussion of the fixes that are needed have focused primarily on police accountability such as civilian oversight and requiring officers to wear body cameras. Few analysts have made the crucial link between police brutality and economic injustice. Now, grassroots activists are not only pointing out that black lives matter, but by extension, black jobs matter, too.
From the article: a landscape of new, youth-led organizations now populates the political domain. Their tactic of choice is participatory politics, which they pursue through the disintermediating power of digital media for grass-roots organizing. Using an array of tools — from protests to memes to agitprop — they seek to change the public agenda, mobilize the marginalized and advocate policy reforms. A network of loosely affiliated organizations, whose links are growing tighter, has been pursuing racial justice for nearly a decade now, right under the noses of the mainstream media.
Walsh: ...at the moment the MOA 11 stand together as a brave if somewhat reluctant figurehead, a group of thought leaders who see themselves as torch bearers of their lunch-counter-sitting and back-of-the-bus–sitting forefathers and mothers before them, taking on America’s history of institutional racism itself.
Joseph: Her prosecution gives us an opportunity to ponder the true meaning of “lynching,” and to remember and to grapple with this shameful and bloody aspect of our nation’s history. We may willfully forget the past, but doing so will never make the consequences of the past disappear.
Garza: I'm curious and I keep waiting to hear from folks, beyond the slogan that they believe that Black lives matter. What are you actually going to do to ensure that Black lives matter? That's the real conversation we want to have.
