by MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
PHOTO/Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting
‘Plus ça change …’ say the French; or ‘The more things change, of course, the more they stay the same.’
That thought, with all its despair and wisdom, resonates with particular power when we look at the Black Freedom Struggle, which, despite its ebbs and flows, has a sameness that seems to suspend it in its own time, akin to a Biblical narrative that exists in its own realm, strangely separate from our day-to-day immediacy, yet existing in consciousness.
But this is not a metaphysical discussion.
No.
It is existential. It is blood and bullets. It is the hard bricks and cold steel of prison. And it’s not just the sameness of things for extended spaces of time, nor its sinister intensification of repression, but the incessant nature of such repression as a bipartisan expression of American hegemony over and antipathy towards, the Black Freedom Struggle that gives it its malevolent character.
For generations, Black leaders and organizations have been in search for some solution to our oppressions, some appealing to the international community, as expressed in William Patterson’s “We Charge Genocide’ of 1951 (a charge supported by the late Malcolm X). Some 15 years later the Black Panther Party would produce a list of grievances, called the 10-Point Program, decrying the police state’s violence against Blacks, slum lords exploiting Black home renters, and the bane of Black imprisonment, among other concerns. Seven years thereafter, the Black National Political Convention convened in Gary, Indiana, where it denounced the two capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans, the continuous police violence against Blacks, and called for the formation of a National Black Independent Political Party to give voice to the needs of Black people
The foundational documents of these Black activists and organizations, if read today, would seem to have been written today – instead of 50 or 60 years ago.
That tells us that our conditions – or real material conditions – have not changed substantially for over ½ century – over 60 years.
Indeed, in many ways, those conditions have worsened, such as the phenomenon of mass incarceration.
Why? Because the material conditions of millions of Black folk have changed due to de-industrialization, the resultant loss of the tax base, the corporatization of the public school systems, and the explosive expansion of the imprisonment industry – the creation of what I call the White Rural Jobs Program – prisons.
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