Tuesday, September 29, 2015

State Terror Against People of Color (from @Truthdig)

State Terror Against People of Color (from @Truthdig)

2 comments:

Tim Nolan said...

SANTA ANA, Calif.—The police murder of poor people of color—occurring at a rate of roughly two a day across the country—is not only about the indiscriminate use of lethal force. It is also about maintaining an ongoing climate of terror in marginal communities. It is about making it impossible for the poor, cast aside by corporate capitalists as surplus labor, to organize and build meaningful lives and to resist. It is terror by design. And it will not stop until police are disarmed—the authority to use lethal force should be restricted to specialized, highly regulated police units—and finally held accountable under the law. Until the rule of law becomes a reality for those who live in marginal communities, until we obliterate the poverty—the mechanism that keeps people trapped in squalor like penned animals—until we stop gunning the poor down in our streets, the nightmare will not stop. In fact, as poverty and inequality expand, this nightmare will only grow.

Tim Nolan said...

Families, suffocating in grief, terrified for their children, unable to find justice, rendered invisible by the media and crushed by poverty—the worst of all crimes—endure a hell that is directly linked to the plague of mass incarceration, Jim and Jane Crow laws, sunset laws, lynching and slave patrols. This terror is the latest manifestation of white supremacy and the expression of a corporate capitalist state that consciously creates huge pools of unemployed and underemployed. The destitute, desperate for work and kept in a state of constant fear, are easily exploited and unable to rise up against their oppressors.