socialistworker | THE GRAND jury decisions not to indict Darren Wilson or Daniel
Pantaleo in the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner has rightly
sparked a nationwide discussion around the state of police violence
against Black and Brown men and women in the U.S., as well as the
systemic racism that runs through U.S. institutions.
A new vein to the mainstream discussion of police violence emerged
recently during a press conference with Garner's widow, which pointed
out how police brutality and mass incarceration are also issues of
reproductive justice.
In a press conference on December 3,
Esaw Garner, referring to the police officer who murdered her husband,
said, "He's still feeding his kids, when my husband is six feet under,
and I'm looking for a way to feed my kids now."
The concept of reproductive justice, as coined by the women of color-led organization SisterSong, is defined as follows:
The reproductive justice framework--the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments--is based on the human right to make personal decisions about one's life, and the obligation of government and society to ensure that the conditions are suitable for implementing one's decisions is important for women of color.
In a nation where the police, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes murder another Black man every 28 hours, Black families live in constant fear that their sons, fathers, husbands, partners and brothers will be the latest victim.
It is essential that we, as reproductive justice activists are
present to make the argument that it is not enough to have the right to
have children or terminate a pregnancy, but that true reproductive
justice means being able to parent without fear your child will be murdered for playing with a toy gun in a public park or for going to the store to buy Skittles.
10 comments:
Gen. Michael Hayden in the video interview excerpted above indicates to me that even within the established agglomeration of military/political/corporate common interests, that there's been somewhat of a tectonic shift in favor of the cats capable of gun and technology exploits. If you look at that Jose Rodriguez video, it's clear that they all want to be able to enjoy their ill-gotten proceeds without having to look over their shoulders, but here recently, they're making it increasingly obvious that they're not all that concerned about having to look over their shoulders, or, having you aware of their governance hijinks.
http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2010/10/is-this-happening-in-afghanistan-if-not.html
Charles Murray, I get. Didn't realize the backstory to it tho. And, not much from the googol on it either.
http://www.isreview.org/issues/09/soldiers_revolt.shtml THE MOST neglected aspect of the Vietnam War is the soldiers' revolt--the mass upheaval from below that unraveled the American army. It is a great reality check in an era when the U.S. touts itself as an invincible nation. For this reason, the soldiers' revolt has been written out of official history. Yet it was a crucial part of the massive antiwar movement whose activity helped the Vietnamese people in their struggle to free Vietnam--described once by President Johnson as a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country"--from U.S. domination. The legacy of the soldiers' revolt and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam--despite more recent U.S. victories over Iraq and Serbia--casts a pall on the
Pentagon. They still fear the political backlash that might come if U.S. ground forces sustain heavy casualties in a future war.
The army revolt was a class struggle that pitted working-class soldiers against officers who viewed them as expendable. The fashionable attempt to revise Vietnam War history, to airbrush its horrors, to create a climate supportive of future military interventions, cannot acknowledge that American soldiers violently opposed that war, or that American capitalism casually tolerated the massacre of working-class troops. Liberal academics have added to the historical distortion by reducing
the radicalism of the 1960s to middle-class concerns and activities, while ignoring working-class rebellion. But the militancy of the 1960s began with the Black working class as the motor force of the Black liberation struggle, and it reached its climax with the unity of white and Black working-class soldiers whose upsurge shook U.S. imperialism.
I’ve never heard of breaking bad. I do know about Russell Maroon Shoatz and many others.
[TPTB are infinitely more concerned about the aggregation of the poor, Bacon's Rebellion 101.] Not really, because they believe that race trumps class (particularly among poor and working class white people), and there is no evidence in the history of the US to prove otherwise. Bacon was vehemently anti-Indigenous Peoples. He needed enslaved Afrikan warriors to win. These Afrikans kept fighting after Bacon died, and after most of the white rebels caved in. DD’s analysis of Dr. King’s shift of focus “to poverty over racism” has no basis in historical fact, as proven by the evil triplets.
[TPTB are infinitely more concerned about genuine tribal affiliations than they are about the tissue-paper thin "ism" of race.] And the glue that holds the tribes of the North Atlantic together is race.
[The Soldier's Rebellion scared TPTB worse than anything else we'd done in the 20th century.] Who is the we in “we’ve done?” My comrade Ahmad Daniels was involved with this rebellion and he will tell you that it took place within the context of the movements for justice, and against the Vietnam War. Without those external struggles, there is no struggle within.[Real resistance is lethally violent, not conversational...,] --LOL, the people saying this are only engaged in conversation.
@glue holding together NATO...,
demonstrated so completely by world wars I and II and the Cold War, and the current heatup in the ukraine and the economic devastation of the ruble
your fixation on race has made your vision hella blurry Bro. Makheru.
lol, tell your brother ahmad daniels that y'all lost worse than any losers ever..., (i'm guessing he already knows that fact)
“demonstrated so completely by world wars I and II and the Cold War, and the current heatup in the ukraine and the economic devastation of the ruble”
Periodically, they have violent internecine conflicts over who is going to rule the tribe, and the world. This is totally consistent with their intracultural behavior as articulated by Dr. Marimba Ani. The head of imperialism moved from the Iberian Peninsula, to Britain with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, to the US after WWII. Dr. Du Bois explained some of this in 1915: “The African Roots of War.” http://www.webdubois.org/dbAfricanRWar.html
They are obviously confident that they can kill millions of each other and still rule the world, particularly Afrika.
“your fixation on race has made your vision hella blurry Bro. Makheru.” My vision is blurred the same way Dr. King’s vision was blurred: "When asking Negroes to abide by the law let us also declare that the white man does not abide by the law. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments. He flagrantly violates building codes and housing regulations. His police forces are the ultimate mockery of law. He violates laws on equal employment and education. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society. Negroes live in them, but they do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. And so let us say forthrightly that, if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years are calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would handily be the white man. In using the term white man I am seeking to describe in general terms the Negro's adversary. I seek not to categorize all white people by any use of the term white man... To develop a sense of black consciousness and peoplehood does not require that we scorn the white race as a whole. It is not the race per se that we fight but the policies and ideology formulated by leaders of that race to perpetuate oppression."
http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/articles_papers_reports/4960.html
This 1968 speech is further proof that DD is historically ignorant of MLK's last years
How did Daniels lose when he was part of what you called “the Soldier's Rebellion (which) scared TPTB worse than anything else we'd done in the 20th century.” Since you were not part of this, I’m assuming that the words “we’d done” imply that you supported this behavior which was, per the socialist review, influenced by Black liberation activities: In 1965, the troops came from a working class that had moved in a conservative direction during the Cold War, due to the long postwar boom and McCarthyite repression. Yet, in the five years before the war, the civil rights movement had shaped Black political views. The troops had more class and trade-union consciousness than exists today. The stateside Movement for a Democratic Military, organized by former members of the Black Panther Party, had as the first points of its program, "We demand the right to collective bargaining," and "We demand wages equal to the federal minimum wage." When the Defense Department attempted to break a farm workers' strike by increasing orders for scab lettuce, soldiers boycotted mess halls, picketed and plastered bases with stickers proclaiming "Lifers Eat Lettuce." When the army used troops to break the national postal wildcat strike in 1970, Vietnam GI called out, "To hell with breaking strikes, let's break the government." Shortly after the war began, radicalism started to get a hearing among young workers. As the Black liberation struggle moved northward from 1965 to 1968, 200 cities had ghetto uprisings--spreading revolutionary consciousness among young, working-class Blacks. In the factories, those same years saw a strong upturn in working-class militancy, with days lost to strikes and wildcats doubling. Left-wing ideas from the student movement were reaching working-class youth through the antiwar movement. In 1967 and 1968, many of the troops had been radicalized before their entry into the army. Still others were radicalized prior to being shipped to Vietnam by the GI antiwar movement on stateside bases. Radicalizing soldiers soon came up against the harsh reality that the officers viewed working-class troops as expendable.
1. It's very rare for any group to succeed in the US without forging alliances with the ethnic mainstream.
2. Marimba Ani's observations on the pathology of power are on target, but I seriously doubt that the Zulu empire, Ethiopia, or Dahomey behaved any differently than teh Euro.
As a putative Celt, I hear people talk about perfidious Albion and our honest Irish warriors ... but I don't make decisions on that basis. That's not information, it's fairy tales.
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