"Police brutality is endemic to American history." "Policing in the United States is a force of racist violence that is entangled at the core of the capitalist system."
"Even the best training in the world cannot teach police, who are licensed to kill and deployed to enforce a racist system, not to be racist."
"Aggressive policing is the bulwark of a segregated America."
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."
Kolhatkar: Such police responses to the burgeoning anti-brutality movement are part of a concerted campaign to maintain support for the status quo. That status quo has been in place since the end of slavery: Poor communities, especially communities of color, are expected to submit to the authority of the police state.
Giroux: Already imperiled before the aftershocks of the terrorists’ attacks, democracy became even more fragile in the aftermath of 9/11. Almost fourteen years later, the historical rupture produced by the events of 9/11 has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate.
From the article: “We wanted to make sure [Anderson’s death] didn’t get swept under the rug,” Rachelle Smith told The Huffington Post. She and others protested at Cleveland's Justice Center this week over the lack of information in Anderson's case. “We hear a lot about Tamir Rice and Eric Garner … There’s no hierarchy in these tragedies, but she was unarmed, and the police were called to help her -- there’s this intersectionality of oppression there, and innocence.”
Black bodies swingin’ in the summer breeze strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees
Martin Luther King Jr.‘s legacy isn’t like a stone statue with fixed significance and predictable contours—it takes on different meanings depending on the American cultural climate at a given moment. truthdig.com January 19, 2015 Twitter/#ReclaimMLK This year’s observations of Martin Luther King Day around the country carried the charge of galvanizing events in the latter More
The Minnesota ACLU, responding to these charges and to demands that the protestors pay for the police who were called to the scene, released the following statement. "There is finally growing concern and dialogue regarding the failure of our criminal justice system to hold police officers accountable for acts of excessive force and other misconduct," the statement says. "These problems are happening in our backyard and should not be ignored."
The world needs to know not only that America’s promise of justice for all is a lie but that it is expressed against the rest of the world, too. The anti-globalization group came into being in response to the United States and NATO attacks on the Russian government and interference in the domestic crisis in More
A great collision is coming, driven by a question that has been asked repeatedly for nearly four centuries. It was asked by 19 Africans, enslaved in the English colony of Jamestown in 1619, and is being asked again by the protesters across the nation. Can Black life be valued in America?
