Some Of Us Would Never Dream of Calling the Police

Today is December 4th.  Its the 50 year commemoration of Chicago, Illinois, U.S., police carrying out a pre-dawn planned raid to murder leaders of the Illinois Black Panther Party simply because of the Panther's objective of bringing justice to African people.  On that day, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed and this illegal and immoral assassination of respected African leaders came to serve as one of the most clear and ill refutable pieces of evidence supporting claims by the African community in general, and the Panther's in particular,  of systemic police terrorism against our people.  

Today, exactly 50 years after that terrorist act in Chicago, the top police terrorist in the U.S., the Attorney General, a man named Barr, declared that communities within the U.S. that "don't show respect for police" may not receive "police protection."  Barr didn't elaborate, but it shouldn't take a college degree to figure out what he meant.  Those 'communities" he referenced are the communities dominated by African and Indigenous people (and even poor European communities) who exhibit historical distrust for police agencies.  And, these communities have every right to distrust police.  They distrust because they know the entire purpose of police agencies is the enforce the will and interests of the ruling class (capitalist) elites who, rightfully so, perceive the African masses as a constant threat to this country.  For the masses of European people in this society, they are programmed to see police, and this country, as something they must protect at all costs.  So, based on their conditioning, our distrust for police is seen as treason.

Besides the irony that Barr's statements were made on a day that commemorates one of the best examples for why we distrust police, when I read what he said, my mind immediately jumped to Kwame Ture's statement that "capitalism makes everything normal seem strange, and everything strange seem normal!"  Millions of Africans live in hundreds of urban areas across this country and a very low percentage of them believe they will achieve justice in their lives by calling 911.  In fact, most of us who call police whenever there is a threat, do so because they just don't believe they have any other alternative to stop the challenges being imposed against them.  Why do you think Public Enemy's 1991 record "911 is a Joke" was such a hit?  Under these desperate conditions, we would argue that if we developed the ability to protect our own people, you would find it very difficult to find any of us who dial 911 under any circumstances.  So, instead of us going along with these devils and pretending that police protect our people and that we even want them anywhere near any communities we inhabit, what today symbolizes to me is that its time for us to start implementing programmatic work to build self determination for our people against police terrorism.

Earlier today I read an article that said that cowardly terrorist George Zimmerman, who savagely killed young Trayvon Martin, is suing the Martin family because events since that 2012 killing have hurt Zimmerman's feelings.  As Kwame's statement reminds us, only in this backward society can a racist killer achieve the opportunity to wreck further trauma on the family he victimized.  Yet, Zimmerman's position as a neighborhood watch captain when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin provides a dysfunctional glimpse into what we as a people can do to build up our capacity to eliminate the chance our youth like Martin will be  harmed ever again.  As has been written multiple times in this blog, we accomplish this by organizing our communities with defense models structured after our Pan-African unification model written in Kwame Nkrumah's "Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare."  In that classic work, Nkrumah calls for the creation of the All African People's Revolutionary Army (A-APRA) which linked to the All African Committee for the Political Coordination and the All African People's Revolutionary Party, will serve to liberate Africa and African people.  The A-APRA will be formed by uniting all of the trained, both physically and politically, military forces into one worldwide fighting force for African liberation.  These neighborhood community defense models in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Central, South America, and the Caribbean, would serve as branches to the Pan-African model of organization that will strengthen us to a point of action where no one among us feels the need to call terrorists to solve any problem that we encounter.

The police never make our conditions better.  They are not here to do that.  They are here to control us.  Now, we know that Barr is making his statement not strictly at us, but at the masses of trained European working class white people, who are a human tempting a hungry dog with a slab of meat.  His statement was classic Southern Strategy.  Dog whistle against African and other colonized people by "threatening" us that you are going to ensure police do not function within our communities.  Feeding meat to the racist white masses by reaffirming to them that they are the true "Americans" who deserve all of the services that this country has to offer and that we, as burdens on this society, will no longer "benefit" from the police.  Of course, the truth is we don't benefit from police.  We don't need police and we don't want police.  Its time for us to organize so that we can keep these bloodthirsty animals away from our people.  So, we are not alarmed by comments by racists like Barr, Trump, any of them.  We know that none of them hold the key to our future.  Only we do.  So, hopefully these times can serve as the wake up call for us to start taking action to eliminate this false security by creating real security for us and all of humanity.