by GLEN FORD
The current political “awakening” in Black America is essentially a long delayed resistance to the mass Black incarceration regime imposed nearly half a century ago as a national response to the Black liberation movements of the Sixties. This “New Jim Crow,” as Michelle Alexander describes it, is a “comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized control that functions in a manner strikingly similar” to the “old” Jim Crow that was defeated during the Civil Rights era. The new regime was different than Jim Crow, in that it was a national policy, whose beginnings can be traced to the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), created in 1968 to fund, train and coordinate the activities of local and state law enforcement agencies. The LEAA and its successors played the central role in militarizing and vastly expanding both urban and rural police forces. SWAT teams sprouted in virtually every city and county as shock troops of counter-insurgency, providing armor and firepower to what the Black Panther Party had already described as “armies of occupation” in Black communities – north, south, east and west.
President Richard Nixon declared his so-called War on Drugs in 1971 and created the Drug Enforcement Assistance Administration (DEA) the next year. The federal drug offensive was purposefully conceived, as Alexander and others have documented, as a War On Blacks, designed to criminalize a whole people and thus achieve Jim Crow-like levels of social control over the nation’s most despised and volatile group. “Well-disguised” or not, the mass Black incarceration regime has been remarkably successful. Incarceration rates – especially for Blacks – began their dramatic rise around 1970, after a decade of relatively flat figures. Within the space of a single generation, African Americans would comprise one out of every eight prison inmates on the planet, and Black society would be in tatters.
“SWAT teams sprouted in virtually every city and county as shock troops of counter-insurgency.”
Yet, there was still no coherent resistance from the entrenched Black political class, joined at the hip with the national Democratic Party and in constant pursuit of individual mobility or symbolic – and ultimately meaningless – tokens of group recognition. In 1986, half the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed 100-to-1 penalties for crack cocaine possession, condemning hundreds of thousands of their constituents to draconian prison terms. Twenty-eight years later, in June of 2014, just two months before a Ferguson, Missouri, cop gunned down Michael Brown and set off the current “awakening,” only eight Black members of Congress – just 20 percent of the Black Caucus – voted for a measure that would have ended the Pentagon’s role in militarizing local police departments; the rest voted “Nay” or abstained.
These “Treasonous 32,” as we wrote in these pages, “are conscious collaborators with the Mass Black Incarceration State that dehumanizes, frames, imprisons, humiliates, tortures, maims and kills Black people for a living.” Clearly, the current incipient movement must confront and defeat its internal enemies in the Black Misleadership Class, who are allies and enablers of the Mass Black Incarceration State.
The internal Black struggle is perhaps the most difficult and painful aspect of the current dilemma. What is even more troubling, however, is the toll that the passing of years has taken on the collective Black memory of “movement” politics, particularly regarding the critical nature of demands. Movements are defined by their demands, yet key elements of the current mobilization seem unable, or unwilling, to frame demands that are consistent with the voices of the youth who are calling for an end to the Mass Black Incarceration State and the armed occupation that enforces that regime. Instead, they tinker around the edges, asking minor concessions from Power that may actually make the prevailing order more palatable, and give a false impression of progress. For example: more “training” for police (as if their crimes are not the result of purposeful, nationally sanctioned training) or more Black officers (as if the cops’ color will override their mass incarceration mission), or variations on patently fraudulent “community policing” schemes (whose mission is to deepen police penetration of the community).
“The federal drug offensive was purposefully conceived as a War On Blacks, designed to criminalize a whole people.”
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