2012 Police Attacks on Black and Latino Youth Multiply

This Shit Must End!! 
And WE Must End It!!

by Carl Dix | December 23, 2012 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

As 2012 draws to a close, rage builds over the murder of Jordan Davis, a Black youth in Florida who was gunned down by a white man named Michael Dunn. Dunn was angered by Jordan and his friends playing their music too loud, and says he fired eight shots at them because he saw a shotgun, a gun that has yet to be found, in their car. Think about this—a white man says he felt in fear for his life after he confronted Black youth playing loud music, and this is seen as possible justification for murdering one of them. They might as well declare open season on Black youth in “Stand Your Ground” Florida.

This brings to mind the racist murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman—who considered a Black youth in a hoodie automatically “suspicious.” Add to these unofficial murders the police murders of Ramarley Graham in NYC; Manuel Diaz and Joel Acevedo in Anaheim, California; the authorities in Jonesboro, Arkansas, calling it a suicide when Chavis Carter was found dead of a bullet to the head in the back seat of a cop car while double handcuffed, and many more outrages that were perpetrated in 2012.

COPS AND VIGILANTES STEALING THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN MUST NOT BE TOLERATED! IT MUST BE ENDED!

This is part of the whole way the criminal “injustice” system is unleashed to assault Black and Latino people today. Add to these official and unofficial murders the more than 2.2 million people warehoused in prisons across the country, 60 percent of them Black or Latino. Add to all that the 400,000 immigrants held in detention centers in the course of a year. And stop-and-frisk in NYC, gang injunctions in California and other places, and other forms of racial profiling that make Black and Latino youth a criminalized generation, guilty until proven innocent, if they can survive to prove their innocence. And how former prisoners are subjected to open discrimination even after they’ve served their sentences.

ALL THIS TOO MUST NOT BE TOLERATED! IT TOO MUST BE ENDED!

All this adds up to millions of Black and Latino youth facing lives going into and out of prison as a rite of passage. In addition to the two million-plus people in prison, there are five million former prisoners who are reduced to the status of second-class citizens by the discrimination they face. When you consider the loved ones of all these people, you get a picture of tens of millions of people living their lives enmeshed in the web of the criminal “injustice” system. This is why I’ve called out mass incarceration as being a slow genocide that could easily become a fast one.

This represents a continuation in different form of the whole history of vicious oppression of Black people since the 1st Africans were dragged to these shores in slave chains.

As Bob Avakian has put it:

“This system, in this country, in the whole history of its treatment of Black people, what has it been?

First, Slavery … Then, Jim Crow—segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror … And now, The New Jim Crow—police brutality and murder, wholesale criminalization and mass incarceration, and legalized discrimination yet again.

That’s it for this system:

Three strikes and you’re out!”

Avakian is right on time here. We need a revolution to end once and for all the brutal, vicious oppression of Black people and other oppressed nationalities, and the 1001 other horrors this system inflicts on humanity—the violence and degradation enforced on women all over the world, the wars for empire, the ravaging of the environment. A revolution that brings into being a totally different society where power is in the hands of the people, led by their communist vanguard, and where radically different economic, social and political relations are in effect.

And right now what’s needed is resistance. Everybody needs to be a part of fighting this. If you have an ounce of concern for what’s being brought down on tens of millions of people in society, YOU HAVE TO JOIN THIS FIGHT.

I mean, how can anyone stand aside when millions of youth are destined for futures of oppression and oblivion even before they are born? We need determined mass resistance—to the police brutality and police murder, to the torture-like conditions in prison, to racial profiling, to the whole slow genocide of mass incarceration.

Our resistance has to be taken to a much higher level in 2013. To a level that can beat back the horrors that are being inflicted on so many people, that can reverse the trajectory of brutality and criminalization this society has been on for so long. Resistance that can capture the imagination of people broadly, that can open the eyes of those who are kept in the dark about all what’s being done in their names and let those who bear the brunt of all this know they’re not alone, that when they stand up and fight back, others will stand with them. YOU HAVE TO BE A PART OF FORGING THIS MUCH NEEDED RESISTANCE!

We in the Revolutionary Communist Party are going to be right in the thick of building this resistance, mobilizing masses to Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution! From whatever perspective you come at all this, you need to join in taking on these horrors.

Stand with the prisoners who have put their lives on the line to fight the torturous conditions they face in prisons across the country. Spread the impact of the Call for unity that has been issued by prisoners in the segregation units in California.

Stand up and say NO MORE to police murder and police brutality, to racial profiling and to discrimination against former prisoners.

Join in and help forge a massive struggle to stop mass incarceration.

The slogan, Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide, expresses the reality faced by millions of people in U.S. society.

2013 must be a year of breaking that silence!

Send us your comments.