Two Recent Pieces by Jalil Muntaqim

Hands Up – Don’t Shoot


Contrary to the refrain from the tragic Ferguson, Mo., shooting of Michael
Brown, we know that keeping your hands up does not mean you will not be
shot. Assata Shakur had her hands up when she was shot on the New Jersey
turnpike by a State Trooper, Oscar Grant was laying face down on a subway
platform when he was shot in the back by a Bay Area Transit cop, Sean Bell
was executed in a hail of bullets by a half dozen N.Y. city cops while
sitting in a car, and Trayvon Martin fought to defend himself when he was
murdered by a wanna-be cop just yards from his home. Obviously, I find
this plea for mercy sorely insufficient, in fact, indefensible when a
trained killer has a weapon pointed at you under the guise of Blue
authority. Needless to say, this passive posture generally supports the
inferior and superior paradigm, creating a social environment in which
Black lives do not matter. Brooke Reynolds, in an essay titled “Policing
Race,” informed:

“This “order” was created and protected by US law. From slavery to today’s
militarized ghettos, it is clear that racial violence has almost always
occurred explicitly or implicitly in cooperation with the law. William and
Murphy trace the relationship between the law and social order: “The fact
that the legal order not only countenanced but sustained slavery,
segregation, and discrimination for most of our nation’s history and the
fact that the police were bound to uphold that order sets patterns for
police behavior and attitudes toward minority communities that has
persisted until the present day.” (Parenti). In terms of the relationship
to the police themselves, “Government-sponsored racial discrimination and
segregation have deeply affected the organizing ethos and practices of US
policing.” (Parenti)—thus, it becomes clear that “... relationship between
police violence and social institution of policing is structural, rather
than incidental or contigent.” (Martinot, Sexton). Wielding an arsenal of
moralist rhetoric and trained over hundreds of years of historical
practice, the police work in conjunction with white society and its
government to keep white lawlessness understood as nothing other than
“public order,” enforcing “the law of white supremacist attack” with
determination and fervor.”

In response this reality, Robert Williams wrote the book “Negroes With
Guns,” reflecting on the institutionalization of State violence and the
inherent human rights of Black people to defend themselves, that was also
practiced by the Deacons for Defense opposing Klu Klux Klan violence.

Reynolds continues:

“By confronting the perpetration of police racial violence with the
maintenance of social order, it is rendered unidentifiable, ignorable, and
inarticulable. Having been so deeply written into our very conception of
social organization and policing, police brutality and racism becomes
invisible to white society (who also has an investment in denying the
reality of racial violence). Shocked by stories of police violence and
unmoved by the dehumanization of racial profiling, white people
simultaneously reveal their ignorance of and investment in the violent
inherent in the protection of white supremacy.”

Furthermore, Reynolds states:

“The ignorability and inarticulability of racist police violence to white
society is directly related to its historical and current impunity.
Authorized by the government end white society as a whole, the police are
given the freedoms necessary in order to guarantee the stability of white
supremacy and to continue constructing racialized identities. Within this
system, injustices done to people of color are not classified as
injustices, if they are recognized at all. Police murders, abuses, and
terrorization of people of color, no matter how gratuitous, are more often
than not met with legal indifference, public support, and are virtually
bereft of consequences. Martinot notes the relationship between modern-day
police impunity, slave patrols, and white supremacist law:

“Both the police and the impunity of slave masters belong to the same
paradigm of dual systems of law, sanctioned by the law, in producing the
subjection of people of color. What contemporary juridical procedure has
done, by valorizing police impunity, is regenerated the doubled system of
law of the slave system… Thus, both manifest the component elements of
white racialized identity paranoia…, violence…, and white solidarity…”
(Martinot).

“The racist police violence which pervades the landscape of US society
today is not incidental, nor [is it] the work of ‘rogue cops,’ [It is] an
essential part of the larger campaign of social re-racialization”
(Martinot). Historically rooted in a very real desire to subjugate and
control people of color in America, and operating in a way which inscribes
and deepens whiteness as an identity and a value, today’s police forces
operate along the same paradigm as their predecessors.” (Reynolds)

These lengthy quotes from Reynolds “Policing Race” establish the lens in
which we are to view the recent rash of police killings of unarmed Black
people. It is extremely important that conversations and national debate
about the relationship between the police and the Black community is not
the same as the relationship between the police and the white community.
The historical ramifications of this dynamic relationship today are
subject to the reality of the racist culture in law enforcement. Law
enforcement modus operandi, for all intents and purposes, are based on
outside armed forces, albeit white people, patrolling communities of
color, with all of its inherent racial implications.

Over forty years ago, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense raised the
e very same issues, establishing their patrols to ensure police officers
conducted their business in accord with the law. For their actions and
concerns for the welfare of the Black community, the BPP became the number
one target for extermination by law enforcement across the country. The
primary reason is because the BPP did not believe or practice passive
resistance, they were not in the streets chanting “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.”
Such passive pleas would be considered a misguided belief protesters would
be safe challenging a system of armed forces with innate disdain for the
well being of Black people’s lives. Rather, such modus operandi parallels
the racial attitudes of the slave patrols out of which the police system
evolved. (See, Hadden, Sally E., Slave Patrols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001) (Reynolds, pg. 3-8).

The task of young people today is to increase pressure and define the
national debate on the relationship between the Black community and
police. De-Militarization and De-Centralization must become the primary
demand. The call for community control of the police was what the BPP
fought to achieve, and that objective is what needs to be demanded now.
The police need to live in the community, not come from outside the
community. There must be more diversity in the command and structure of
the police, reflecting the composition of the community they patrol.

It is time to reverse the chant ‘No Justice No Peace’ to “No Peace Without
Justice,” it is time to ensure Black lives matter as much as white lives,
and that all people’s lives are as sacred as police lives.

The First Line of Defense IS power to the People!

Remember: We Are Our Own Liberators


Attica 12/5/14

WHEN POLICE DIE!

Once again, the nation is compelled to mourn the death of police officers. Rightly so, if such mourning changes the dynamics of the relationship between a para-militarized police and the communities in which they patrol. By no sense of the imagination should anyone be cavalier about the killing of a police officer, no more than they should be when a police officer wrongly kills a civilian, especially an unarmed civilian. But that is the point. When the valorization of the life of a police officer is raised to the level of hero-worshipping, what does that do to the psyche of the general population in respect to their own lives? Thus, the PBA’s demagoguery (presumably to enhance future contract negotiations) and self-righteous condemnation must be viewed in light of how it ultimately serves to improve police-community relationships.

In my previous blog, “Hands Up–Don’t Shoot,” I ended by stating, “…it is time to ensure Black lives matter as much as white lives, and that all people’s lives are as sacred as police lives.” So, that leads to the question, how is that possible when police lives are considered far more valuable than anyone else’s; they are more valued than a sanitation worker’s, a postal worker’s, the bus and taxi driver’s, all of whom serve the community.

Granted, police officers, like firemen, at times put their lives on the line to safeguard the lives of others. It is terrible that in our highly developed technological society, our humanity has yet to reach a point in which the police have not become obsolete. However, I am of the opinion that all of our humanity is challenged by the historical dynamic of racism and. capitalism (exploitation and profiteering). As was learned from OWS, 1% of the population controls and owns 99% of the country’s wealth. Unfortunately, more often than not, the police are used as tools of the capitalist class to protect financial interests over human interests. This is especially disconcerting as it pertains to the racialized disenfranchised and poor, such as racial profiling, In this regard, police violence represents the interests of the State. As I was once told, the police are the first line of defense for the maintenance of state power. If this is true, then it is extremely important the community-at-large recognizes how their lives are only as important as the state permits, for as long as they are exploitable/profitable.

Obviously, the dichotomy between the institution of police and society needs to be investigated and reevaluated, especially, when one is armed (militarized) and the other, for the most part, unarmed and vulnerable. The public perception and discourse imposed by corporate media shapes our collective thinking on the legitimacy of violence; state violence is legitimate, and any violence not sanctioned by the state is illegitimate. We then consciously accept the inevitability of the state, and thus the virtue of its violence.

Hence, community violence in inner cities is not sanctioned by the state, and therefore, it must be policed. Generally, we agree with this policing, when it saves lives and establishes social order. However, there is a causation for inner-city violence that is not readily considered for problem-solving, only managed by policing. Forty years ago, the Black Panther Party sought to challenge the causation of inner-city violence. The BPP attempted to rid the community of drug dealing, gang violence, and police brutality and murder, creating free breakfast programs, free community health clinics, supporting tenants’ rights, etc. In response, the BPP was confronted with the full force of state violence, essentially destroying a movement with the potential of de-criminalizing the community, forging a revolutionary future. Lest we forget, permit me to remind us all, the death of a movement for liberation serves to keep in place the status quo of state violence in all of its forms.

Again, we must loathe all those who fail to recognize the sanctity of life. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to reject corporate media efforts to confuse the valorization of police above and beyond deaths of unarmed civilians killed by police. The noble protest against police violence must not be undermined or in any way disputed; the communities’ grievances are real and must be resolved with justice. We cannot afford to continue to preserve the dichotomy that lends to inferior to superior social paradigm in class and race relationships, and we certainly should not seek to maintain socio-economic disparity that lends to inequitable distribution of wealth.

The De-Militarization and De-Centralization of police is the primary objective that will serve to ensure the safety of the community. The demand for community control of the police strengthens the capacity of the community to police themselves, ridding the community of outside armed and potentially racist forces occupying the community.

In this regard, Martin L. King, Jr. raised the following:

“The question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”

The First Line of Defense IS Power to the People!

Fist Up Fight Back!

Remember: We Are Our own Liberators!

Jalil A. Muntaqim

Attica 12/22/14

Anthony J. Bottom #77A4283

Attica C.F.

P.O. Box 149

Attica, NY 14011-0149