racism

Ferguson Protest Movement Must Become Political Power by Christopher Benson

December 12, 2014

[Reposted from The Chicago Reporter with permission from the author.]

As protesters in Ferguson, Mo., look ahead, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past — lessons that can provide guidance in transforming protest into something more impacting, more enduring.

Political power.

One such lesson comes out of Chicago, where 45 years ago this Thursday, Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by tactical police assigned to Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan, who had worked with the FBI counterintelligence program. Planning. Executing.

It all happened in the pre-dawn darkness on Dec. 4, 1969, while 21-year-old Hampton and other Panther members were asleep in their West Monroe Street apartment. Hampton reportedly had been drugged by an informant to make sure he would not awaken. Clark was on guard duty. None of the seven Panthers was given a chance to put up their hands before they were hit with a barrage of bullets.

Although Hanrahan would feed the media a self-defense narrative (the “vicious” Panthers fired first, he claimed), it later was revealed that all but one of an estimated 99 bullets had been fired by the police. Two reportedly were fired at point-blank range into Hampton’s head. One to Clark’s heart, killing him instantly. The only Panther bullet reportedly came from Clark’s shotgun in what appears to have been a reflexive act upon his death.

Adding insult to injury, the Panther survivors of that raid, including Hampton’s pregnant fiancée, Deborah Johnson, all were charged with weapons violations, aggravated assault and attempted murder. Charges later were dropped. The survivors were represented by People’s Law Office lawyers Jeffrey Haas, G. Flint Taylor and Dennis Cunningham, as well as future Chicago Corporation Counsel and University of Illinois Trustee James Montgomery. They wound up winning a $1.8 million settlement against the Chicago Police in 1983 in what Attorney Taylor would call “nothing but a Northern lynching.” But that is not the significant lesson for Ferguson protesters.

The lesson is in the African-American political organizing that followed the Hampton-Clark assassinations. As a result of massive black voter registration and turnout, Hanrahan was denied a second term as prosecutor in his 1972 re-election bid. African-Americans overwhelmingly supported Republican Bernard Carey for what historically had been a safe Democratic office. Hanrahan would never again win a political campaign.

Even more, that same engine of strategic political organizing was retuned for the successful Chicago mayoral campaign of Harold Washington a decade later, and even for Barack Obama in his successful U.S. Senate election a little more than 20 years after that.

As we reflect on Michael Brown in Ferguson and Fred Hampton in Chicago, we have to consider what has been lost in terms of the potential of a lifetime, but also what can be gained in potential organizing.

What was lost with Hampton?

He had been a community organizer. By all accounts, he was gifted in that leadership role, moving from his work with the NAACP to the newly formed Panther Party, where he was credited with successfully organizing a non-aggression agreement among Chicago street gangs —the first “Rainbow Coalition.” He also organized a People’s Clinic, free breakfast program for kids and, these, too: political education classes, community supervision of the police and advocacy of self-determination and self-defense. Because of this work, he was seen as a threat by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose agency famously embarked on a campaign of disruption and destruction of African-American organizations. And the organizers.

No one understands this as much as Dr. Charles V. Hamilton, W.S. Sayre Professor Emeritus of Government and Political Science at Columbia University. In 1967, the year Fred Hampton began his community organizing, Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), co-authored the seminal ”Black Power: The Politics of Liberation,” the intellectual and activist blueprint for self-determination in an evolving movement.

In a wide-ranging weekend conversation I had with Hamilton in his Hyde Park condo six floors up from mine, he talked of the need for a reassertion of “black power” in a new context. He talked about Hampton and about the dehumanization of the African-American and what Hamilton calls “the legitimization of violence against non-people.”

He talked about the need to reframe the discourse. “We’ve got to get people to start thinking in different narrative terms,” Hamilton believes. Citing Aristotle, Hamilton asserted the need for replacing our law-and-order obsession with a new perspective on equity, which “goes to areas the law can’t reach.” Political organizing is the path to equity.

Hamilton should know. The perspective of this 85-year-old activist-scholar might have been contextualized in the Ivory Tower in Morningside Heights, but it was formed and sharpened at ground level, deep in the heart of Dixie. It happened during an early faculty position at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he could not register to vote in the late 1950s. “The registrars never opened the office.” Not for black people, anyway. Hamilton wound up organizing voting-rights demonstrations among Tuskegee students. He worked with famed civil rights attorney Fred Gray on legal briefs leading to the landmark 1960 Supreme Court decision striking down Tuskegee’s gerrymandered voting in Gomillion v. Lightfoot.

For his efforts, Hamilton was fired from that Tuskegee teaching job. The school founded by Booker T. Washington was not ready to disrupt the status quo. Black voting rights in the Alabama of the 1950s clearly would have been a disruption.

That was true in other parts of the country, including Money, Mississippi, where 14-year-old Emmett Till had been lynched in 1955. Till, who spent his childhood in Summit, the Chicago suburb where Fred Hampton later would live with his family, had stepped out of his assigned place with a childish prank, flirting with a white woman. He was tortured and murdered to send a message to other African-Americans.

Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury after merely an hour of deliberation. These 12 angry men had been influenced by the white county sheriff who helped the accused murderers get off, when he had a sworn duty to help the prosecutors send them to prison.

Of the 30,000 residents in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi back when the trial was held, 19,000 were African-American. Yet not a single black person was registered to vote. In a county with a two-to-one black majority, black people had no political power to elect the sheriff or serve on juries. It is likely the Till murder trial would have turned out differently if black residents had the vote.

That was then. It all would change, beginning with the protests that erupted from the acquittal of Till’s murderers and the mass movement that flowed from that, starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott only two months later. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were outgrowths of this mass movement. Today, the state of Mississippi has more than 200 black elected officials, more than any other state.

Hamilton — the man who gave us the term “institutional racism” — refers to this kind of Black Power as a form of “experiential reality.” It is a three-step process. African-Americans must first become “politically literate” to understand the importance of participation, and what the struggle to gain that right has cost us historically. “There is no such thing as an uneducated free person,” he insists.

Second, they must register to vote and turn out to make enlightened choices informed by an appreciation of the background and qualifications of the candidates, as well as the significance of the offices they seek. Finally, people must realize the rewards of voting. Successful campaigns will encourage more participation. “This is a permanent struggle,” Hamilton believes. “Things change. Times change. We’re always working at it.”

The chance to work at it in Ferguson will come with the local elections scheduled there for April 2015. Three of the five City Council seats are up. Blacks make up 67 percent of the local population. Last time around, fewer than seven percent of eligible black voters turned out in Ferguson, where the local elections are the only ones on the ballot in the odd years. With a new majority on the council, maybe African-Americans in Ferguson will get some measure of Charles Hamilton’s equity. Maybe a police force that looks more like them than one that still is 94 percent white — and one that recognizes that putting your hands up is not an aggressive move.

People of color in Ferguson — and elsewhere for that matter — have to recognize their responsibility as generation rising, the latest beneficiaries of people who died to secure their voting rights — rights that can be exercised to attain responsive government. To make sure the killers of our sons are punished. In Money, Mississippi. In Chicago, Illinois. In Ferguson, Missouri.

Clearly, the protesters in Ferguson should continue to raise their hands. But not in surrender. No. They should do it as a promise, as a pledge, as a solemn oath.

“We have to use this as a springboard to not only march, but to march to the polls,” Hamilton urges. And when people get there, they should place their hands on the ballot to make sure their protest voices are heard.

Christopher Benson is a blogger for The Chicago Reporter.

Antiblack Racism and Moral Panics by David J. Leonard

September 20, 2014

A National Pastime: Antiblack Racism and Moral Panics

America is a nation bound together by moral panics; in the absence of an actual moral center or a compass of justice, we find power in collective outrage in the absence of self-reflection. And race or antiblackness is often what anchors these fits of moralism.

It is an expert at racial moral panics, a truly exceptional world power when it comes to moral posturing, collective outrage, and the resulting finger pointing. From the culture wars of the 1980s to debates regarding hip-hop into the 1990s, from discourses around “black homophobia” and “black on black crime,” and far deeper into history, moral panics are often wrapped up discourses of blackness. James Baldwin spoke of this quintessential American tradition in 1960: “I think if one examines the myths which have proliferated in this country concerning the Negro.” Accordingly “beneath these myths a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine. In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities, with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race” (quoted by Bouie)

Writing about the 1980s and the demonization of “welfare queens,” George Lipsitz (1995) identifies this history as one where “Americans produce largely cultural explanations for structural problems.” With a long history of scapegoating and locating moral imperatives and cultural impurities through bodies of color, it should come as no surprise that the release of video footage of then Ravens Running Back Ray Rice striking his then girlfriend Janay Palmer has sent America, from The Capital to the American media landscape, from NFL stadiums to Starbucks, into a perpetual state of moral outrage.

The effort to reduce social ills to individual failures, to individual pathologies, and cultural dysfunctions comes through a centering of blackness within these discourses. “What is forbidden in American culture often seems to be projected outward onto the outsider or scapegoat,” writes James (1996). “Blackness has come to represent sex and violence in the national psyche. Although they gain notoriety as the most infamous perpetrators of unrestrained criminality, African Americans are given little recognition in media, crime reports or social crusades as being victims.” The refusal to see or hear Janay Palmer, Kasandra Perkins and countless more makes this all too clear.

Directed at Rice (and several other players), and Roger Goodell for failing to properly control, discipline, and punish the NFL’s “out-of-control,” the moral panic feels less and less about intimate partner violence (IPV), hyper masculinity, a culture of violence, misogyny, or patriarchy, but instead yet another moment to locate social ills within the bodies of black men. Blackness, especially in the sporting world, is “legible” (Neal 2014) only as signifiers of dysfunctional, danger, criminality, and corruption. This has been the case with IPV, and equally evident in the aftermath of Adrian Peterson’s arrest. According to Jamelle Bouie, “It’s reminiscent of other conversations around broad-based behaviors or beliefs that become pathological and purely “black” when displayed by black Americans in elevated numbers.”

As black bodies are ubiquitously imagined as essentially disruptive, uncontrollable, as a source of “cultural degeneracy” the problem of IPV becomes not an American problem and not even one belonging to the NFL — but a problem of blackness. Blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140). The outrage resulting from Ray Rice reflects the logics of anti-black racism, perpetuating a culture that sees blackness as the problem, one that needs to be contained, purified, controlled, punished, and ultimately eliminated.

The outrage has little to do with the pervasive and endemic problem of IPV within the NFL and society as a whole. In a nation where 1 in 3 women report having experienced IPV, where 1 in 5 men admit to having committed violence against a partner, one has to wonder why now, why did Ray Rice prompt a national soul searching regarding the problem of IPV? In a nation, where the media and the court system routinely rationalize the prevalence of IPV through victim blaming and excuse making, forgive me if I ain’t buying this feigned outrage. The political power structure, particularly the GOP, should have a seat; they should delete their press releases and their demands for “zero tolerance” and simply look in the mirror. From its foot dragging with the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act to its budgetary PRIORITIES, it is clear that the political structure is perfectly fine with domestic violence. Combatting violence against women is not a priority, at least if it requires more than a press conference. In 2013, the National Domestic Violence Hotline was unable to answer “77,000 calls due to lack of resources.” And this isn’t the only example of how the GOP, and the Congress as a whole, has no moral standing with respect to IPV.

“The Republican romance with gun rights has proved deadly. More than 60 percent of women killed by a firearm in 2010 were murdered by a current or former intimate partner. The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by an astonishing 500 percent, writes Katie McDonough. “The Republican-led assault on reproductive freedom has major implications for victims of domestic violence. Republican resistance to mandatory paid leave policies means that women who need time off to leave an abusive relationship or are hospitalized after a domestic violence incident can lose their jobs for missing work.” Congress and their friends at the NRA, like the NFL, is reflective of a culture of domestic violence and a complicit actor in the daily injustices experienced by all too many women and children in this society. In a nation where judges and police officers (“family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population”) engage brutal acts of violence against women with impunity, where ESPN and other sports media, routinely mock and reduce women to dehumanized objects of consumption and ridicule, it is hard to believe in this feigned and surely short-lived outrage about Domestic Violence (DV).

The rampant hypocrisy, the racist moralism, and the scapegoating are equally evident in the types of “solutions” being proposed. In the face of rightful, even when misplaced, outrage, the NFL created a VP position in charge of “social responsibility” (to be filled by Anna Isaacson, the league’s current VP of community affairs and philanthropy) and hired three domestic advisors (Lisa Friel, Jane Randel and Rita Smith). Goodell, the benevolent white father figure whose primary responsibility was disciplining the league’s “unruly” black bodies had failed. In this context, 4 white women have replaced him. The focus on punishment, the embracing of the language of mass incarceration, and the moral posturing should give us pause in that the logics, tropes, and policies that have compelled mass incarceration are the center of the NFL’s reclamation project. The focus on individual accountability (which needs to be part of the process) at the expense of collective transformation and societal cultural change, the concern with response rather than dealing with root causes highlights the systemic failures to truly address intimate partner violence.

At its core, the post-Ray Rice discourse is not about IPV; it is not about concern for Janay Palmer or collectively saying #blackwomenslivesmatter or #womendeservejustice. It is about racial paternalism and the historic efforts to imagine sports not as exploitation, big business, profits, and a health risk, but one of disciplinarity and moralism. Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson put these narrative rationalizations in question, resulting in panic and further reimagination of sport as a source of good. According to King and Springwood (2005), “Perhaps such public concerns and panics are best understood as a form of racial paternalism in which white America struggles to come to terms with its (exploitative) enjoyment of the African American athlete by advancing a linkage between the ostensibly moral and disciplinary space of … big time sports.”

The selective outrage at players within the NFL (and the league for not controlling them) and not Major League Baseball or Hollywood (Charlie Sheen) or mainstream music industry, or the police, or the military, or every American institution is revealing. The silence regarding Hope Solo, who stands accused of domestic violence, playing for the U.S. National Team is telling: whiteness matters.

So is the lack of moral outrage for Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, Rekia Boyd, and countless others. One has to look no further than Marissa Alexander, who faces 60 years in prison for firing a warning shot against an abusive husband whose history of violence has been well-documented, to understand the nature of today’s moral panic. One has to look no further than at the thousands of women locked up for defending themselves against an abusive and violent partner. America’s (so-called) moral center bends not toward, but away from the arc of justice. It is guided by racism and sexism; its compass is profit before people. We need a new compass not a new policy; a moral center of justice not more of the same: we need a new pastime

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David J. Leonard is an associate professor and chair in the department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington State University, Pullman, and the author of a forthcoming book on race, media and gun violence. Follow him on Twitter.