Get In Where You Fit In When You Stand Up For Your Rights

“Most people think that Great God will come from the sky

and take away everything and make everybody feel high.

But if you know what your life is worth,

you would look for yours on Earth.

Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights.” ~ Bob Marley

When all else fails, YouTube comes to the rescue for me. I don’t know what I did without it before some saint or entrepreneur or whatever devised it for the rest of us. But this morning, I was struggling my way through my 14th week of hardcore self-quarantine alone, alternately depressed and agitated, when I went to YouTube to find a few meditation videos before I punched somebody in the throat or killed myself.

I found a couple of beautiful videos, posted one to Facebook, and then, as I got ready to post the one above on there, as well, I realized that I miss blogging. Blogging takes more time, more crafting, more thought, more reflection, more passion, more commitment, more of myself. So slowly but surely, as I worked what amounted to two full-time jobs for the past fifteen months, I blogged less and less, throwing up someone else’s work or an occasional video and once in a blue moon, I actually wrote something.

But I’m going to change that. Beginning today.

Prisoners Have No Patience Because They Have No Choice

The Powers-That-Be in this country have made an art form out of using the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to turn humans (a disproportionate number of them Black) into slaves so that corrupt prison administrators, corporations, and their stockholders can enjoy ever expanding financial gains. It occurs to me as I write this that, while the 13th Amendment does make this practice legal (as immoral as it is), what it does not make legal is the multiple forms of prisoner degradation, humiliation, violation, and abuse that most U.S. prisons have made a standard operating procedure in the way they treat millions of incarcerated men, women, and even children.

It is not only the prisoners who suffer. It is their loved ones, as well, who must agonizingly observe the brutality against and sometimes death of their missing family member or friend while enduring the separation they fight to overcome.

In the early 1970s, when I first became aware of what was going on in the prisons and jails across this land, I was instantly and horrifically aghast. What kind of monsters would so relish tormenting other humans, I wondered. I became ballistic in my rage, working tirelessly to raise consciousness about the matter as often as possible. One ex-prisoner, trying to help me really get my brain around the situation, reminded me that people in this country lock up animals in cages who haven't done anything to anybody. "As long as they do that," he pointed out, "they're not going to care about people they think of as criminals." But I refused to listen.

Still, here we are nearly fifty years later and it appears he was right.

So the prisoners are left no recourse but to riot or to strike -- which in most prisons would be seen as the same thing and treated the same way. This is why Florida prisoners announced recently that they intend to meet the brutality and exploitation with resistance starting today. My heart is with them.

I know that many in the U.S. have no sympathy. They think the prisoners deserve whatever they get, that organizing to rise up in any way that attempts to claim their human rights "proves" their recalcitrant nature. But the article I am re-posting today (with permission of the author) is about why that's the only option prisoners have left.

Russell Rickford: "The Fallacies of Neoliberal Protest"

One of the organizers of Cornell BSU's Black Lives Matter rally on 9/23/16

(Credit: Julia Cole Photography)

 

This post is an amended version of remarks read at a rally organized by Cornell University’s Black Students United (BSU) on September 23, 2016. Students gathered to protest the recent police shootings of Tyree King, Terence Crutcher, and Keith Lamont Scott. It appeared originally on the blog for the African American Intellectual History Society and it is being re-posted here by permission of the author.

Sisters and brothers:

I’m delighted that you are mobilizing. Your demonstration reflects your recognition that the escalating crisis of racial terrorism requires a firm and uncompromising response.

Your protest in the face of daily atrocities is a sign of your humanity and your determination to live in peace, freedom, and dignity.

But as we demonstrate, we must take pains to avoid certain tactical and programmatic errors that often plague progressive protest in a neoliberal age.