SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal
"Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned and
demonstrated, among other things, to get the racist
power structure of America to right the wrongs which
have been historically perpetrated against Black
people. All of these efforts have been answered by more
repression, deceit, and hypocrisy.... City Hall turns a
deaf ear to the pleas of Black people for relief from
this increasing terror."
--Dr. Huey P. Newton, Ph. D., Minister of Defense,
Black Panther Party, _To Die for the People_ (1973)
The much-ballyhooed recent concert held in the Meadowlands,
New Jersey has become the food for many a newspaper or radio
station, hungry for the stuff of spectacle. The musicians were
assaulted by a litany of complaints, and were vilified by police
and their political agents, on the basis that for such musicians
to dare speak out in the interest of fairness and justice for a
man encaged on Death Row, was some kind of violation.
Politicians raged and sputtered, and lamented that the First
Amendment to the Constitution would not allow them to stop the
proposed concert. Why did that so-very-hallowed constitutional
principle hold when the players wanted to play, but ignored when
the young people and organizers wanted to pass out or sell
information? How special is the First Amendment? It isn't.
To the brave and principled groups which dared to play in
the bared fangs of the state's hostility, we must all send our
salutes and our kudos. They have done something that was truly
remarkable.
To the state, we must send our hisses, and wonder at their
strange sense of Selective Outrage.
When a group of young college students were enroute to
Central State University, and were shot by a cabal of state
troopers after being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, where
was the outrage?
When young men are shot by cops in the streets of Newark,
Camden, Asbury Park or any other city where Black people live,
where was the outrage?
The monstrous disparity between the state's funding for
students of poor people in Camden, and the children of wealth and
means in Princeton at primary and secondary levels--where is the
outrage?
The recent street murder of Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo
while standing in his Bronx doorway, where cops fired over 40
shots at an _unarmed man_, at which time the state's propaganda
forces of the white supremacist press called for "calm", a "wait-
and-see" attitude, --Where is the Outrage?
Given the recent attacks on poor and Black folks around the
nation, who are the unarmed victims of paramilitary police power,
who are blown into oblivion by the police with utter impunity--
where is the outrage?
If one examines these and other instances, one finds that
there is no outrage, for it is not outrageous for the political
and economic elite when Black and poor people are summarily
executed by the state. This is exactly what is to be expected. It
is nothing exceptional. It is their warped _status quo_.
When this occurs, there is no outrage. It is expectation. It
is simply the accepted way of how things are.
When people stand up to this system, when they unite against
the morbid forces of death, while the press bays "outrage" they
really reflect concern and anxiety at the unity of people, who
they think should be divided against each other.
The unity of the people is the greatest weapon against the
system's works.
Therefore, our unity is so important. Therefore, our unity
is attacked.
What makes this event so truly remarkable still, is that it
exists in the face of vicious, unprincipled, and naked attacks on
all of those on Death Row, not just one man. Several years ago,
the state and federal government cut all funding to all post-
conviction legal services to all men and women on Pennsylvania's
Death Row. They are now completely undefended, and at the "tender
mercies" of the state that wishes to kill them. That so many good
people would assemble to assist the defense of just one of that
number, is an act of resistance to the system that would deny any
meaningful defense to them _all_.
There should be outrage, against a system that dares to call
such a perverted system a fair one. There should be outrage,
against those who sit in silence when the rights of any are
denied. There should be a swelling sense of outrage, at the
system that cries alligator tears when one man is defended, and
209 men and women remain undefended.
The death penalty is an outrage, one kept in operation by a
conspiracy of state terror, a bare shadow of "defense", and the
vicious political will of base prosecutors who care more for
their career than what is truly just.
It is an outrage. Isn't it?
Monday, May 28, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
greater than race-
"On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa summit conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson : that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently dicredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation; that until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race; that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but fleeting illusions, to be pursued but never attained. And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in sub-human bondage have been toppled and destroyed; until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil. The basis of racial discrimination and colonialism has been economic, and it is with economic weapons that these evils have been and can be overcome. In pursuance of resolutions adopted at the Addis Ababa summit conference, African states have undertaken certain measures in the economic field which, if adopted by all member states of the United Nations, would soon reduce intransigeance to reason. I ask, today, for adherence to these measures by every nation represented here which is truly devoted to the principles enunciated in the charter. We must act while we can, while the occasion exists to exert those legitimate pressures available to us lest time run out and resort be had to less happy means. The great nations of the world would do well to remember that in the modern age even their own fates are not wholely in their hands. Peace demands the united efforts of us all. Who can foresee what spark might ignite the fuse? The stake of each one of us is identical-life or death. We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us. The problems which confront us today are, equally, unprecedented. They have no counterparts in human experience. Men search the pages of history for solutions, for precedents, but there are none. This then, is the ultimate challenge. Where are we to look for our survival, for the answers to the questions which have never before been posed? We must look, first, to the Almighty God, Who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason. We must put our faith in Him, that He will not desert us or permit us to destroy humanity which He created in His image. And we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been : more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."
Haile Selassie I 4 October 1963 United Nations, New York.
Haile Selassie I 4 October 1963 United Nations, New York.
Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson
PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2003)
Website Below:
http://www.proudfleshjournal.com/vol1.2/brown.html
Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson
Elaine Brown
It was two days before his assassination at San Quentin prison, on August 21, 1971, that I saw George Jackson for the last time. He blew me a kiss through the glass divider between us, until the next visit. The radio news commentaries in the early afternoon of August 21st were scattered but wild, reporting a melee had broken out at San Quentin between guards and prisoners. There was no doubt George, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, was at the center of it, attacked, again. He would resist their assault, again. He could not die, I believed. Even shackled, as he always appeared by then, he was more powerful than the reactionaries. They could not kill him. At the end of the day, several guards would be killed, their throats slit.
That night, though, I felt an inexplicable wind that I imagined was George Jackson soaring, free. They had claimed his life that day, but death had not contained him. The spirit of the people was greater than the Man’s technology, we sloganized. The spirit of George lived.
His death became palpable when I accompanied his mother, Georgia, to the mortuary days later, after San Quentin’s pigs finally released the remains. He was her first son, who had been her only son for that last year, the second to die in one year. His younger brother, Jonathan, had been shot down at 17 years old in a valiant attempt to free him. Georgia came to the mortuary with an agenda, to see with her own eyes what they had done to him, to see the wounds, perhaps to touch or heal them, to bring him back to life, Mary at the feet of Jesus. The scalp had been pulled back, the mortician said, rendering the body unfit for viewing. She finally shrugged, resigned, with blood in her eyes, which would become the title of George’s posthumously published book, and demanded photographs be taken. Photographs were taken of the body, of the head that held the brain and the brilliance, now smashed by bullets.
As I have recounted and recalled for all these years, the most distressing moment came in purchasing the clothes for the massive frame of George Jackson. There were the black pants, accessorized by a black leather belt, an item denied him for those last years. He had been confined on a $70 robbery conviction for the last 11 years of his life, which was nearly half his life. There was the powder blue shirt, the black leather jacket and the black beret. His body would be dressed in full Panther regalia.
The 10,000 gathered in Oakland’s crisp August sunshine for blocks around Father Neal’s church, St. Augustine’s Episcopal, where one of the first Free Breakfast for Children Programs was housed, saluting Comrade George with raised fists, blacks and whites and Latinos, silently watching the Panther honor guard transport the casket, draped with the Panther flag, the black panther emblazoned on a field of blue, solemnly proceed inside the building, where four Party members with shotguns saluted the Field Marshal, Nina Simone’s recorded voice filling the auditorium: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free….
Huey P. Newton, founder, chief ideologue, Minister of Defense of the Party, now called Servant of the People, eulogized George:
George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor that’s characteristic of any soldier for the people. He inspired prisoners to put his ideas into practice and so his spirit became a living thing. Today I say that although George’s body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his ideas live…. George’s last statement, his conduct at San Quentin on that terrible day, left a standard for political prisoners and for the prisoner society of racist, reactionary America…. He demonstrated how the unjust would be criticized by the weapon…. George also said once that the oppressor is very strong and he might beat him down, he might beat us down to our very knees but it will be physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson and the people will tear his kneecaps off.
…We know that all of us will die someday. Bu we know that there are two kinds of death, the reactionary death and the revolutionary death. One death is significant and the other is not. George certainly died in a significant way, and his death will be very heavy….
(“Afterword,” George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye [Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990]: pp. 194-96.”).
Less than one month later, over one thousand inmates at Attica state prison in New York, mostly black men, rose up, in the spirit of George, and in honor of George and the Prisoner Movement he had originated: “We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.” The prisoners at Attica took over the prison in protest of the inhumane living conditions there, and took guards as hostages to exchange for promises of decent food and beds and medical care and the like.
After a four-day standoff with the state police, with press from all over the world recording the moment, the prisoners were told they had one last chance to release the guards and return to their cells. The individual, organizational and press negotiators the inmates had requested, including Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, had been ordered out of the prison. No demands would be met. It was over, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared, as his state police sharpshooters and hundreds of other state police positioned themselves to retake the prison. The sharpshooters assembled on the top of the wall surrounding the main yard, D Yard, where prisoners had fashioned a kind of tent city, had held daily rallies and press conferences, urging, demanding improved conditions.
Under Rockefeller’s order, on the signal from their commander, the state police sharpshooters opened fire, automatic rifle fire, onto D Yard, indiscriminately spraying the inmates gathered there. Over 40 men were slaughtered on the spot, including 11 guards. Many, many more were seriously wounded. Order was declared restored.
Even the very spirit of George, as the Prisoner Movement, seemed quelled, as it all came to be quieted over the next years. Ultimately, the Party itself fell away into non-existence, beaten down by years of suffering the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) machinations, fatigue, internal strife and a malaise that would overtake the mass black consciousness and black communities for the next decades. Somewhere in between, I wrote a song for George, a meager tribute to a powerful man:
Oh, I was so in love last year
or, rather, the year before.
And if it wasn’t death that claimed them,
it was the hard, cold prison door.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
But if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confine them.
The criminal justice system in post-Civil War America seems to have been specifically structured to contain the released members of the Slave Class. As my friend and comrade Khalil Osiris powerfully argues in his new treatise on the Black Slave Class in America, articulating finally, fully, the class nature of racism in America, prior to the passage of the 13th Amendment, blacks, African captives and their descendants, as slaves for 250 years, had been the sole members of an economic class of people whose labor was the backbone of the development and institutionalization of the American agrarian market economy. Neither a feudalist peasant class nor an industrial working class, black slaves were a free-labor force that formed a class in the American capitalist construct preceding the Marxist doctrine that the industrial working class was the engine of this new capitalism, and arguing for the dictatorship of this proletariat. As most presidents prior to Lincoln had been slaveholders, as the social fabric of America was interwoven with the Jeffersonian theory about the inherent inferiority of the black to the white, the Jacksonian declaration that America was and ought be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, and Lincoln’s attempts to colonize blacks on the island of Hispaniola rather than “free” them, and as the men of America’s developing robber baron class envisioned their domination as the nation’s, blacks became unnecessary in the industrial capitalist pyramid, a cancer on the skin of the country if not a blight on the memory of America’s wealth-building, or nation-building. America had no further use of this class or race, for this people.
While the small northern black population could be held in check by sheer numbers, unable to compete with the burgeoning population of poor Europeans pouring into New York harbor under the government’s enticement programs to cultivate its industrial fields, the massive southern black population, representing half or more of the population of the former Confederate states, was contained and restrained from entering into the scheme of things via the Black Codes. Using the 13th Amendment’s caveat that slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime,” the South passed laws, criminal laws, regulating the behavior of blacks. The most egregiously oppressive “crime” was “vagrancy,” more far-reaching than the strict definition of the word. “Unemployed” blacks were deemed guilty of vagrancy. The punishment was the chain gang, hard, free labor performed under government contracts with private businessmen to build railways and roads and other privately engineered public works. Desperately, most blacks slipped back onto plantations as sharecroppers, a euphemism at best.
If a black skirted punishment under the Codes, harsher remedies for black “crimes” awaited him or her at the hands of any number of the white terrorist bands organized in the months following passage of the 13th Amendment, and before its ratification at the end of 1865. These included the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Jayhawkers. Lynching became the common punishment reserved for blacks—men and women. The great freedom fighter Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the definitive authority on the lynching of blacks, documented that between 1878 and 1898, there were 10,000 lynchings of blacks.
Dr. Katheryn Russell, in her book The Color of Crime “(New York: New York University Press, 1999).” posits that “blackness itself” became a “crime.” Osiris argues that in America’s transition from agrarianism to industrialization, blacks went from a Slave Class to a Prisoner Class.
Once it was clear at the end of the Civil War that General Sherman’s command that every slave family be given 40 acres of tillable land to begin their lives in freedom would be completely disregarded, as the meager efforts of the Freedman’s Bureau to coordinate the distribution of such lands and effect other legal rights of blacks would be dissipated, blacks on all sides of the law came to be effectively confined and punished—and not to be free. That is, the masses of blacks, struggling to circumvent the Codes and the Klan, as supported by the federal government and the Northern industrialists and their hordes of immigrant European workers in pursuit of their interests, which were not served by the integration of blacks into the society, found themselves scraping for survival in the Sisyphean sharecropping schemes, which resembled their lives as slaves, or sentenced to terms of hard labor on the chain gang. With few, inconsequential exceptions, Northern blacks, too, found themselves confined to lesser lives, unable to overcome the racism permeating the industrial workforce, struggling along mostly as domestic service workers. Finally, this black confinement North and South of the Mason-Dixon line was defined by Plessy, introducing American apartheid and all its terrible ramifications. From that point forward, black life in America centered around a struggle for freedom and justice under the law, through mass efforts led by men like Booker T. Washington and Du Bois and Garvey and A. Philip Randolph and Malcolm X and King, through lawsuits like Brown, and through legislation like the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts.
When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, the focus of its agenda was the 7th Point of its 10-Point Platform & Program: to end police brutality in black communities. This was because the most urgent problem facing blacks was the repressive activity of local police forces to contain them, to restrain black rage over ongoing poverty and wretched living conditions. The famous government study of the time known as The Kerner Report, commissioned on account of the powerful 1965 uprising of blacks in Watts, California, had declared that the cause for such black rage, as was exhibited in Watts, was white racism, which had produced the black ghetto and a divided America, one white and one black, “separate and unequal.” By this time, of course, in the wake of the great black migration North on account of the availability of World War II work, a significant majority of blacks lived in America’s industrial centers—though unable to find work in the industrial workforce after World War II.
After the Watts uprising, the Los Angeles Police Department, in the vanguard of numerous others across the country, began a practice of regularly rounding up young black men in ghetto areas, brutally enforcing criminal codes and ordinances expediently passed in the aftermath of the uprising under which the very street corner gathering in the ghetto of two or more blacks became a crime, notwithstanding the 1st Amendment right to assembly. Young black men were massively arrested on police “suspicions” of criminal behavior, jailed for resisting, or shot down in what the Black Panther Party called a “red light trial.”
When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and the other original Party members stepped out onto the streets of Oakland wielding defensive shotguns against police abuses, urging blacks to resist, they were first identified as “thugs.” When the Party grew, on the heels of what became the Free Huey Movement that erupted when Huey was charged and put on trial for having allegedly killed a white Oakland police officer in 1967, the FBI identified the Party as a criminal organization. The Party’s work became the business of the criminal justice system, not the government or the legislatures. Indeed, it was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-term director of the FBI, who announced in 1968 that the Party represented “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” and who led the effort to eliminate that “threat.” Criminal laws were held forth to justify an agenda to destroy the Party through the assassination of Party leaders, violent police raids on Party offices around the country, and counter-intelligence operations to disrupt and undermine the organization. Numerous Party members were murdered over time and many more were imprisoned—some of whom, like Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, still languish in prison to this very day, over 30 years later. Every month in 1969, alone, there was a State-sponsored assassination of a member of the Black Panther Party, from Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles in January to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in December. Then, in 1971, George Jackson was killed by San Quentin prison guards.
As its numbers dissipated, through assassinations and jailings, fear driving away so many more, the Party concentrated its force in one city, its headquarters, Oakland, California, and de-emphasized the gun, emphasizing its Survival Programs to feed and house and attend to the medical needs of blacks, building its coalitions inside the U.S. and internationally, becoming involved in electoral politics, and focusing all it had on building a powerful, revolutionary base inside the United States of America. Approaching a plateau of victory, though, the Party apparatus seemingly slipped, unable to stand up under the weight of its past. By 1982, the Black Panther Party had become extinct, representing the demise of the last, and perhaps the greatest, effort of blacks in America to find freedom.
In 1983, Little B was born in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the Age of Reagan and the Age of Crack. By the time this black boy, Michael Lewis, called “Little B,” was eight years old, his house had become the crack house, America’s schools had been completely re-segregated, affirmative action programs were being challenged and disappearing, black poverty remained entrenched, black wealth remained an illusion, the black infant mortality rate remained double that of whites, and blacks continued to struggle to live in the ghettoes of America, like “the Bluff” where Little B was born. By the time he was 11 years old, Michael’s mother was declared unfit, and he began living on his own on the streets of the Bluff, and Bill Clinton seduced America into acceptance of his 1994 “three-strikes” amendment to the Omnibus Crime Bill.
This ushered in a new wave of black arrests, in seemingly greater disproportion as to black population figures than ever before. Indeed, under Clinton, more people came to be incarcerated than under Reagan and Bush before him, combined. Blacks were being criminalized and arrested for drug use, particularly for crack cocaine, for petty theft responses to ending poverty that rose to the definition of robbery and “armed” robbery, for “driving while black.” Blackness itself still seemed to be a crime. While the black population was approximately 13%, blacks came to represent nearly 50% of the prison population. Among them, by 1997, was Little B, sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14.
One could barely recall his name by then, George Jackson, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, assassinated at San Quentin prison. I went to see about Little B. Hearing of his case, I wanted him to forgive me, all of us who had promised and meant to change the world for him, and for the millions of black children like him in yet another generation. I went to see about him with no more than the memory of George and the Party and our dream about freedom. I swore I would work for him until he was free, knowing there was no real agenda for all the rest, confined for “breathing while black.” I would fight with an organization I helped form called Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice (MAJJ) to overturn the laws providing for the adjudication and incarceration of children as adults, sentencing them to harsh mandatory sentences and even life in prison. Needless to say, in Georgia, most of those children so adjudicated were black, indeed, 94% were. Needless to say, this reflected a national norm. I would fight for Michael’s appeal, raise money for a lawyer who would get his railroaded conviction overturned. By extension I would fight for all the other boys whose mothers were a part of MAJJ, knowing freedom was more than a parole date. I spoke out in a loud voice, everywhere, and worked with all the others rising up against the new prison-industrial complex and its mass incarcerations, particularly of blacks. I wrote a book about Michael, for him, to him, The Condemnation of Little B. And I cried watching him grow behind the wall, like “E” and Chuck and Lyndon and Dantae and all the other fine young men whose mothers wept every day for the loss of their sons’ lives behind the wall.
Somewhere in this oppressive fog, in the twilight of my life, I suddenly felt the presence of George rising. Khalil Osiris called me and came to talk to me about George, all of whose words he had read and studied, and about the Party, and about freedom. Where had he been? I wondered. He answered: in prison.
In the 15 years he spent in prison, he had read not only George but Huey and Amilcar Cabral and Marx and Mao and Sartre and Gandhi and Audre Lorde. He had educated himself inside, and, almost incidentally, had earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees inside. He had also co-founded an organization while inside: The National Black Herstory Task Force, based in Atlanta. Almost a generation removed, he had not only educated himself about the Prisoner Movement, he had come out four years before ready to resurrect this Movement, to resurrect the spirit of George and organize the soldiers.
I began recalling the second stanza of my song for George:
I was in love with many soldiers,
for they were a part of me,
a part of all I’d grown with,
though they’d somehow grown free.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
And if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confined them.
Then, as George did on August 19, 1971, Khalil Osiris kissed me, as sister, comrade, woman. He brought the power of so much love from behind the wall. I introduced him to Little B, and he became his father, as I had become his mother, as we became an African family lost in America, separated, segregated, chained, on both sides of the wall.
The spirit of George has not died. With Khalil and other former prisoners and others like me, I have become part of the organizing committee of the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, the goals of which are to repeal “three-strikes” laws, those putting our children in prison for life, and all the others used to justify the high black incarceration rate; to produce programs guaranteeing human rights to prisoners and their families; to develop effective programs for the re-entry, re-enfranchisement and economic self-sufficiency of former prisoners. We do this knowing that all black people in America are members of a Prisoner Class, and recognizing that revolutionary love can tear down the walls that divide us, toward ending this oppression and finally finding freedom.
Website Below:
http://www.proudfleshjournal.com/vol1.2/brown.html
Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson
Elaine Brown
It was two days before his assassination at San Quentin prison, on August 21, 1971, that I saw George Jackson for the last time. He blew me a kiss through the glass divider between us, until the next visit. The radio news commentaries in the early afternoon of August 21st were scattered but wild, reporting a melee had broken out at San Quentin between guards and prisoners. There was no doubt George, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, was at the center of it, attacked, again. He would resist their assault, again. He could not die, I believed. Even shackled, as he always appeared by then, he was more powerful than the reactionaries. They could not kill him. At the end of the day, several guards would be killed, their throats slit.
That night, though, I felt an inexplicable wind that I imagined was George Jackson soaring, free. They had claimed his life that day, but death had not contained him. The spirit of the people was greater than the Man’s technology, we sloganized. The spirit of George lived.
His death became palpable when I accompanied his mother, Georgia, to the mortuary days later, after San Quentin’s pigs finally released the remains. He was her first son, who had been her only son for that last year, the second to die in one year. His younger brother, Jonathan, had been shot down at 17 years old in a valiant attempt to free him. Georgia came to the mortuary with an agenda, to see with her own eyes what they had done to him, to see the wounds, perhaps to touch or heal them, to bring him back to life, Mary at the feet of Jesus. The scalp had been pulled back, the mortician said, rendering the body unfit for viewing. She finally shrugged, resigned, with blood in her eyes, which would become the title of George’s posthumously published book, and demanded photographs be taken. Photographs were taken of the body, of the head that held the brain and the brilliance, now smashed by bullets.
As I have recounted and recalled for all these years, the most distressing moment came in purchasing the clothes for the massive frame of George Jackson. There were the black pants, accessorized by a black leather belt, an item denied him for those last years. He had been confined on a $70 robbery conviction for the last 11 years of his life, which was nearly half his life. There was the powder blue shirt, the black leather jacket and the black beret. His body would be dressed in full Panther regalia.
The 10,000 gathered in Oakland’s crisp August sunshine for blocks around Father Neal’s church, St. Augustine’s Episcopal, where one of the first Free Breakfast for Children Programs was housed, saluting Comrade George with raised fists, blacks and whites and Latinos, silently watching the Panther honor guard transport the casket, draped with the Panther flag, the black panther emblazoned on a field of blue, solemnly proceed inside the building, where four Party members with shotguns saluted the Field Marshal, Nina Simone’s recorded voice filling the auditorium: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free….
Huey P. Newton, founder, chief ideologue, Minister of Defense of the Party, now called Servant of the People, eulogized George:
George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor that’s characteristic of any soldier for the people. He inspired prisoners to put his ideas into practice and so his spirit became a living thing. Today I say that although George’s body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his ideas live…. George’s last statement, his conduct at San Quentin on that terrible day, left a standard for political prisoners and for the prisoner society of racist, reactionary America…. He demonstrated how the unjust would be criticized by the weapon…. George also said once that the oppressor is very strong and he might beat him down, he might beat us down to our very knees but it will be physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson and the people will tear his kneecaps off.
…We know that all of us will die someday. Bu we know that there are two kinds of death, the reactionary death and the revolutionary death. One death is significant and the other is not. George certainly died in a significant way, and his death will be very heavy….
(“Afterword,” George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye [Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990]: pp. 194-96.”).
Less than one month later, over one thousand inmates at Attica state prison in New York, mostly black men, rose up, in the spirit of George, and in honor of George and the Prisoner Movement he had originated: “We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.” The prisoners at Attica took over the prison in protest of the inhumane living conditions there, and took guards as hostages to exchange for promises of decent food and beds and medical care and the like.
After a four-day standoff with the state police, with press from all over the world recording the moment, the prisoners were told they had one last chance to release the guards and return to their cells. The individual, organizational and press negotiators the inmates had requested, including Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, had been ordered out of the prison. No demands would be met. It was over, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared, as his state police sharpshooters and hundreds of other state police positioned themselves to retake the prison. The sharpshooters assembled on the top of the wall surrounding the main yard, D Yard, where prisoners had fashioned a kind of tent city, had held daily rallies and press conferences, urging, demanding improved conditions.
Under Rockefeller’s order, on the signal from their commander, the state police sharpshooters opened fire, automatic rifle fire, onto D Yard, indiscriminately spraying the inmates gathered there. Over 40 men were slaughtered on the spot, including 11 guards. Many, many more were seriously wounded. Order was declared restored.
Even the very spirit of George, as the Prisoner Movement, seemed quelled, as it all came to be quieted over the next years. Ultimately, the Party itself fell away into non-existence, beaten down by years of suffering the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) machinations, fatigue, internal strife and a malaise that would overtake the mass black consciousness and black communities for the next decades. Somewhere in between, I wrote a song for George, a meager tribute to a powerful man:
Oh, I was so in love last year
or, rather, the year before.
And if it wasn’t death that claimed them,
it was the hard, cold prison door.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
But if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confine them.
The criminal justice system in post-Civil War America seems to have been specifically structured to contain the released members of the Slave Class. As my friend and comrade Khalil Osiris powerfully argues in his new treatise on the Black Slave Class in America, articulating finally, fully, the class nature of racism in America, prior to the passage of the 13th Amendment, blacks, African captives and their descendants, as slaves for 250 years, had been the sole members of an economic class of people whose labor was the backbone of the development and institutionalization of the American agrarian market economy. Neither a feudalist peasant class nor an industrial working class, black slaves were a free-labor force that formed a class in the American capitalist construct preceding the Marxist doctrine that the industrial working class was the engine of this new capitalism, and arguing for the dictatorship of this proletariat. As most presidents prior to Lincoln had been slaveholders, as the social fabric of America was interwoven with the Jeffersonian theory about the inherent inferiority of the black to the white, the Jacksonian declaration that America was and ought be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, and Lincoln’s attempts to colonize blacks on the island of Hispaniola rather than “free” them, and as the men of America’s developing robber baron class envisioned their domination as the nation’s, blacks became unnecessary in the industrial capitalist pyramid, a cancer on the skin of the country if not a blight on the memory of America’s wealth-building, or nation-building. America had no further use of this class or race, for this people.
While the small northern black population could be held in check by sheer numbers, unable to compete with the burgeoning population of poor Europeans pouring into New York harbor under the government’s enticement programs to cultivate its industrial fields, the massive southern black population, representing half or more of the population of the former Confederate states, was contained and restrained from entering into the scheme of things via the Black Codes. Using the 13th Amendment’s caveat that slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime,” the South passed laws, criminal laws, regulating the behavior of blacks. The most egregiously oppressive “crime” was “vagrancy,” more far-reaching than the strict definition of the word. “Unemployed” blacks were deemed guilty of vagrancy. The punishment was the chain gang, hard, free labor performed under government contracts with private businessmen to build railways and roads and other privately engineered public works. Desperately, most blacks slipped back onto plantations as sharecroppers, a euphemism at best.
If a black skirted punishment under the Codes, harsher remedies for black “crimes” awaited him or her at the hands of any number of the white terrorist bands organized in the months following passage of the 13th Amendment, and before its ratification at the end of 1865. These included the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Jayhawkers. Lynching became the common punishment reserved for blacks—men and women. The great freedom fighter Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the definitive authority on the lynching of blacks, documented that between 1878 and 1898, there were 10,000 lynchings of blacks.
Dr. Katheryn Russell, in her book The Color of Crime “(New York: New York University Press, 1999).” posits that “blackness itself” became a “crime.” Osiris argues that in America’s transition from agrarianism to industrialization, blacks went from a Slave Class to a Prisoner Class.
Once it was clear at the end of the Civil War that General Sherman’s command that every slave family be given 40 acres of tillable land to begin their lives in freedom would be completely disregarded, as the meager efforts of the Freedman’s Bureau to coordinate the distribution of such lands and effect other legal rights of blacks would be dissipated, blacks on all sides of the law came to be effectively confined and punished—and not to be free. That is, the masses of blacks, struggling to circumvent the Codes and the Klan, as supported by the federal government and the Northern industrialists and their hordes of immigrant European workers in pursuit of their interests, which were not served by the integration of blacks into the society, found themselves scraping for survival in the Sisyphean sharecropping schemes, which resembled their lives as slaves, or sentenced to terms of hard labor on the chain gang. With few, inconsequential exceptions, Northern blacks, too, found themselves confined to lesser lives, unable to overcome the racism permeating the industrial workforce, struggling along mostly as domestic service workers. Finally, this black confinement North and South of the Mason-Dixon line was defined by Plessy, introducing American apartheid and all its terrible ramifications. From that point forward, black life in America centered around a struggle for freedom and justice under the law, through mass efforts led by men like Booker T. Washington and Du Bois and Garvey and A. Philip Randolph and Malcolm X and King, through lawsuits like Brown, and through legislation like the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts.
When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, the focus of its agenda was the 7th Point of its 10-Point Platform & Program: to end police brutality in black communities. This was because the most urgent problem facing blacks was the repressive activity of local police forces to contain them, to restrain black rage over ongoing poverty and wretched living conditions. The famous government study of the time known as The Kerner Report, commissioned on account of the powerful 1965 uprising of blacks in Watts, California, had declared that the cause for such black rage, as was exhibited in Watts, was white racism, which had produced the black ghetto and a divided America, one white and one black, “separate and unequal.” By this time, of course, in the wake of the great black migration North on account of the availability of World War II work, a significant majority of blacks lived in America’s industrial centers—though unable to find work in the industrial workforce after World War II.
After the Watts uprising, the Los Angeles Police Department, in the vanguard of numerous others across the country, began a practice of regularly rounding up young black men in ghetto areas, brutally enforcing criminal codes and ordinances expediently passed in the aftermath of the uprising under which the very street corner gathering in the ghetto of two or more blacks became a crime, notwithstanding the 1st Amendment right to assembly. Young black men were massively arrested on police “suspicions” of criminal behavior, jailed for resisting, or shot down in what the Black Panther Party called a “red light trial.”
When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and the other original Party members stepped out onto the streets of Oakland wielding defensive shotguns against police abuses, urging blacks to resist, they were first identified as “thugs.” When the Party grew, on the heels of what became the Free Huey Movement that erupted when Huey was charged and put on trial for having allegedly killed a white Oakland police officer in 1967, the FBI identified the Party as a criminal organization. The Party’s work became the business of the criminal justice system, not the government or the legislatures. Indeed, it was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-term director of the FBI, who announced in 1968 that the Party represented “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” and who led the effort to eliminate that “threat.” Criminal laws were held forth to justify an agenda to destroy the Party through the assassination of Party leaders, violent police raids on Party offices around the country, and counter-intelligence operations to disrupt and undermine the organization. Numerous Party members were murdered over time and many more were imprisoned—some of whom, like Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, still languish in prison to this very day, over 30 years later. Every month in 1969, alone, there was a State-sponsored assassination of a member of the Black Panther Party, from Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles in January to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in December. Then, in 1971, George Jackson was killed by San Quentin prison guards.
As its numbers dissipated, through assassinations and jailings, fear driving away so many more, the Party concentrated its force in one city, its headquarters, Oakland, California, and de-emphasized the gun, emphasizing its Survival Programs to feed and house and attend to the medical needs of blacks, building its coalitions inside the U.S. and internationally, becoming involved in electoral politics, and focusing all it had on building a powerful, revolutionary base inside the United States of America. Approaching a plateau of victory, though, the Party apparatus seemingly slipped, unable to stand up under the weight of its past. By 1982, the Black Panther Party had become extinct, representing the demise of the last, and perhaps the greatest, effort of blacks in America to find freedom.
In 1983, Little B was born in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the Age of Reagan and the Age of Crack. By the time this black boy, Michael Lewis, called “Little B,” was eight years old, his house had become the crack house, America’s schools had been completely re-segregated, affirmative action programs were being challenged and disappearing, black poverty remained entrenched, black wealth remained an illusion, the black infant mortality rate remained double that of whites, and blacks continued to struggle to live in the ghettoes of America, like “the Bluff” where Little B was born. By the time he was 11 years old, Michael’s mother was declared unfit, and he began living on his own on the streets of the Bluff, and Bill Clinton seduced America into acceptance of his 1994 “three-strikes” amendment to the Omnibus Crime Bill.
This ushered in a new wave of black arrests, in seemingly greater disproportion as to black population figures than ever before. Indeed, under Clinton, more people came to be incarcerated than under Reagan and Bush before him, combined. Blacks were being criminalized and arrested for drug use, particularly for crack cocaine, for petty theft responses to ending poverty that rose to the definition of robbery and “armed” robbery, for “driving while black.” Blackness itself still seemed to be a crime. While the black population was approximately 13%, blacks came to represent nearly 50% of the prison population. Among them, by 1997, was Little B, sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14.
One could barely recall his name by then, George Jackson, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, assassinated at San Quentin prison. I went to see about Little B. Hearing of his case, I wanted him to forgive me, all of us who had promised and meant to change the world for him, and for the millions of black children like him in yet another generation. I went to see about him with no more than the memory of George and the Party and our dream about freedom. I swore I would work for him until he was free, knowing there was no real agenda for all the rest, confined for “breathing while black.” I would fight with an organization I helped form called Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice (MAJJ) to overturn the laws providing for the adjudication and incarceration of children as adults, sentencing them to harsh mandatory sentences and even life in prison. Needless to say, in Georgia, most of those children so adjudicated were black, indeed, 94% were. Needless to say, this reflected a national norm. I would fight for Michael’s appeal, raise money for a lawyer who would get his railroaded conviction overturned. By extension I would fight for all the other boys whose mothers were a part of MAJJ, knowing freedom was more than a parole date. I spoke out in a loud voice, everywhere, and worked with all the others rising up against the new prison-industrial complex and its mass incarcerations, particularly of blacks. I wrote a book about Michael, for him, to him, The Condemnation of Little B. And I cried watching him grow behind the wall, like “E” and Chuck and Lyndon and Dantae and all the other fine young men whose mothers wept every day for the loss of their sons’ lives behind the wall.
Somewhere in this oppressive fog, in the twilight of my life, I suddenly felt the presence of George rising. Khalil Osiris called me and came to talk to me about George, all of whose words he had read and studied, and about the Party, and about freedom. Where had he been? I wondered. He answered: in prison.
In the 15 years he spent in prison, he had read not only George but Huey and Amilcar Cabral and Marx and Mao and Sartre and Gandhi and Audre Lorde. He had educated himself inside, and, almost incidentally, had earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees inside. He had also co-founded an organization while inside: The National Black Herstory Task Force, based in Atlanta. Almost a generation removed, he had not only educated himself about the Prisoner Movement, he had come out four years before ready to resurrect this Movement, to resurrect the spirit of George and organize the soldiers.
I began recalling the second stanza of my song for George:
I was in love with many soldiers,
for they were a part of me,
a part of all I’d grown with,
though they’d somehow grown free.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
And if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confined them.
Then, as George did on August 19, 1971, Khalil Osiris kissed me, as sister, comrade, woman. He brought the power of so much love from behind the wall. I introduced him to Little B, and he became his father, as I had become his mother, as we became an African family lost in America, separated, segregated, chained, on both sides of the wall.
The spirit of George has not died. With Khalil and other former prisoners and others like me, I have become part of the organizing committee of the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, the goals of which are to repeal “three-strikes” laws, those putting our children in prison for life, and all the others used to justify the high black incarceration rate; to produce programs guaranteeing human rights to prisoners and their families; to develop effective programs for the re-entry, re-enfranchisement and economic self-sufficiency of former prisoners. We do this knowing that all black people in America are members of a Prisoner Class, and recognizing that revolutionary love can tear down the walls that divide us, toward ending this oppression and finally finding freedom.
George Jackson: Black Revolutionary November 1971
8/24/2005
George Jackson: Black Revolutionary
By Walter Rodney, November 1971
To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of
George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the
official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in Americas toughest
jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape
this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to
the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson
was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was black,
and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that
blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary
struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George
Jackson was political prisoner and a black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.
Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point
is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders
graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of our
brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days
of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this
prison, black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin
prison authorities who are responsible to America’s chief prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go
beyond the generalities and to understand the most significant elements attaching to George Jackson’s life and
death.
When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was twenty nine years of age and had spent the last
[correction: 11 behind bars—seven of these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen.
He was not part of the regular producer force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the system of
production, lumpen elements in the past rarely understood the society which victimized them and were not to be
counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen
proletariat was originally intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic
working class.
Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point
where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective
frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him. Jackson’s survival for so many years in
vicious jails, his self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were tremendous personal
achievements, and in addition they offer on interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the black mass
in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.
Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the alienation of part of the product of his labor. For the
African peasant, the exploitation is effected through manipulation of the price of the crops which he labored to
produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival
depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of industrialization, workers coined the
slogan the right to work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of this basic right. At best they live
in a limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The line between the
unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.
The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black
people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is
concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched
among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.
Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this
most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In
Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last few
years. Some of the more recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On February
27th this year, black and brown (Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World Coalition. This
came in the wake of such organizations as a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of
SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of mobilization of the nonwhite prisoners was
resented and feared by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-
declared Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white authority on the side
of the Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty on the
side of the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a majority of white prisoners either refused to support
the Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the first principle to be observed was unity in
struggle. Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win allies.
The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true
revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the
movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry,
essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to
learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social
register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.
Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel threatened
by the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from
any form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their bearings
from the street forces of the black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.
Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a response from white America. The small band of white
revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen decried Jackson’s murder by placing a few bombs
in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther
Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed.
The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the
established capitalist press has come out with exposés of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black
prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator Muskie out with a cry of enough.
Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a
whole have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders and
against Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of defense and solidarity
have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of
international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended
with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.
For more than a decade now, people’s liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held
conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective
responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-
colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the
capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world
imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the
beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression.
George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the
belly of the white imperialist beast.
International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities. This is the truth so profoundly and simply
expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three - many Vietnams. It has long been
recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-
imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world imperialism transformed organized labor
in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely, the black struggle is internationally significant because it
unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home
ground. This is amply illustrated in the political process which involved the three Soledad Brothers—George
Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as well as Angela Davis and a host of other blacks now behind
prison bars in the U.S.A.
NOTE: George Jackson also authored Blood In My Eye which was published posthumously, or after this article
was written.
NOTE: Biography of the articles author
WALTER RODNEY: A BIOGRAPHY
Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23, 1942. His was a working class family-his
father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. After attending primary school, he won an open
exhibition scholarship to attend Queens College as one of the early working-class beneficiaries of
concessions made in the filed of education by the ruling class in Guyana to the new nationalism that
gripped the country in the early 1950s.
While at Queens College young Rodney excelled academically, as well as in the fields of athletics and
debating. In 1960, he won an open scholarship to further his studies at the University of the West Indies
in Jamaica. He graduated with a first-class honors degree in history in 1963 and. he won an open
scholarship to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1966, at the age of 24 he was
awarded a Ph.D. with honors in African History.
His doctoral research on slavery on the Upper
Guinea Coast was the result of long meticulous work on the records of Portuguese
merchants both in England and in Portugal.
In the process he learned Portuguese and Spanish which along with the French he had learned at Queens
College made him somewhat of a linguist.
In 1970, his Ph.D dissertation was published by Oxford University Press under the title, A History of the
Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800. This work was to set a trend for Rodney in both challenging the
assumptions of western historians about African history and setting new standards for looking at the
history of oppressed peoples. According to Horace Campbell "This work was path-breaking in the way in
which it analyzed the impact of slavery on the communities and the interrelationship between societies of
the region and on the ecology of the region."
Walter took up his first teaching appointment in Tanzania before returning to his alma mater, the
University of the West Indies, in 1968. This was a period of great political activity in the Caribbean as the
countries begun their post colonial journey. But it was the Black Power Movement that caught Walter's
imagination.
Some new voices had begun to question the direction of the post-independence governments, in particular
their attitude to the plight of the downpressed. The issue of empowerment for the black and brown poor of
the region was being debated among the progressive intellectuals. Rodney, who from very early on had
rejected the authoritarian role of the middle class political elite in the Caribbean, was central to this
debate. He, however, did not confine his activities to the university campus. He took his message of Black
Liberation to the gullies of Jamaica. In particular he shared his knowledge of African history with one of
the most rejected section of the Jamaican society-the Rastafarians.
Walter had shown an interest in political activism ever since he was a student in Jamaica and England.
Horace Campbell reports that while at UWI Walter "was active in student politics and campaigned
extensively in 1961 in the Jamaica Referendum on the West Indian Federation." While studying in London,
Walter participated in discussion circles, spoke at the famous Hyde Park and, participated in a symposium
on Guyana in 1965. It was during this period that Walter came into contact with the legendary CLR James
and was one of his most devoted students.
By the summer of 1968 Rodney's "groundings with the working poor of Jamaica had begun to attract the
attention of the government. So, when he attended a Black Writers' Conference in Montreal, Canada, in
October 1968, the Hugh Shearer-led Jamaican Labor Party Government banned him from re-entering the
country. This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed
and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed..
Rodney's encounters with the Rastafarians were published in a pamphlet entitled "Grounding with My
Brothers," that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.
Having been expelled from Jamaica, Walter returned to Tanzania after a short stay in Cuba. There he
lectured from 1968 to 1974 and continued his groundings in Tanzania and other parts of Africa. This was
the period of the African liberation struggles and Walter, who fervently believed that the intellectual
should make his or her skills available for the struggles and emancipation of the people, became deeply
involved. It was from partly from these activities that his second major work, and his best known --How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa - emerged. It was published by Bogle-L'Ouverture, in London, in
conjunction with Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972.
This Tanzanian period was perhaps the most important in the formation of Rodney's ideas. According to
Horace Campbell "Here he was at the forefront of establishing an intellectual tradition which still today
makes Dar es Salaam one of the centers of discussion of African politics and history. Out of he dialogue,
discussions and study groups he deepened the Marxist tradition with respect to African politics, class
struggle, the race question, African history and the role of the exploited in social change. It was within the
context of these discussions that the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was written."
Page 4 of 5
8/24/2005
Campbell also reports that " In he same period, he wrote the critical articles on Tanzanian Ujamaa,
imperialism, on underdevelopment, and the problems of state and class formation in Africa. Many of his
articles which were written in Tanzania appeared in Maji Maji, the discussion journal of the TANU Youth
League at the University. He worked in the Tanzanian archives on the question of forced labor, the
policing of the countryside and the colonial economy. This work-- " World War II and the Tanzanian
Economy"-- was later published as a monograph by Cornell University in 1976".
Rodney also developed a reputation as a Pan-Africanist theoretician and spokes person. Campbell says
that "In Tanzania he developed close political relationships with those who were struggling to change the
external control of Africa He was very close to some of the leaders of liberation movements in Africa and
also to political leaders of popular organizations of independent territories. Together with other Pan-
Africanists he participated in discussing leading up to the Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Tanzania,
1974. Before the Congress he wrote a piece: "Towards the Sixth Pan-African Congress: Aspects of the
International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America."
In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of
Guyana, but the government rescinded the appointment. But Rodney remained in Guyana, joined the
newly formed political group, the Working People's Alliance. Between 1974 and his assassination in 1980,
he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian PNC
government. He gives public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political
consciousness in the country. During this period he developed his ideas on the self emancipation of the
working people, People's Power, and multiracial democracy.
On July 11, 1979, Walter, together with seven others, was arrested following the burning down of two
government offices. He, along with Drs Rupert Roopnarine and Omawale, was later charged with arson.
From that period up to the time of his murder, he was constantly persecuted and harassed and at least on
one occasion, an attempt was made to kill him. Finally, on the evening of June 13, 1980, he was
assassinated by a bomb in the middle of Georgetown.
Walter was married to Dr Patricia Rodney and the union bore three children- Shaka, Kanini and Asha.
George Jackson: Black Revolutionary
By Walter Rodney, November 1971
To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of
George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the
official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in Americas toughest
jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape
this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to
the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson
was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was black,
and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that
blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary
struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George
Jackson was political prisoner and a black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.
Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point
is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders
graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of our
brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days
of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this
prison, black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin
prison authorities who are responsible to America’s chief prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go
beyond the generalities and to understand the most significant elements attaching to George Jackson’s life and
death.
When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was twenty nine years of age and had spent the last
[correction: 11 behind bars—seven of these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen.
He was not part of the regular producer force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the system of
production, lumpen elements in the past rarely understood the society which victimized them and were not to be
counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen
proletariat was originally intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic
working class.
Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point
where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective
frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him. Jackson’s survival for so many years in
vicious jails, his self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were tremendous personal
achievements, and in addition they offer on interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the black mass
in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.
Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the alienation of part of the product of his labor. For the
African peasant, the exploitation is effected through manipulation of the price of the crops which he labored to
produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival
depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of industrialization, workers coined the
slogan the right to work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of this basic right. At best they live
in a limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The line between the
unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.
The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black
people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is
concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched
among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.
Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this
most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In
Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last few
years. Some of the more recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On February
27th this year, black and brown (Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World Coalition. This
came in the wake of such organizations as a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of
SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of mobilization of the nonwhite prisoners was
resented and feared by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-
declared Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white authority on the side
of the Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty on the
side of the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a majority of white prisoners either refused to support
the Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the first principle to be observed was unity in
struggle. Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win allies.
The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true
revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the
movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry,
essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to
learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social
register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.
Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel threatened
by the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from
any form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their bearings
from the street forces of the black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.
Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a response from white America. The small band of white
revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen decried Jackson’s murder by placing a few bombs
in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther
Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed.
The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the
established capitalist press has come out with exposés of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black
prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator Muskie out with a cry of enough.
Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a
whole have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders and
against Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of defense and solidarity
have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of
international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended
with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.
For more than a decade now, people’s liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held
conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective
responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-
colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the
capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world
imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the
beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression.
George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the
belly of the white imperialist beast.
International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities. This is the truth so profoundly and simply
expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three - many Vietnams. It has long been
recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-
imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world imperialism transformed organized labor
in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely, the black struggle is internationally significant because it
unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home
ground. This is amply illustrated in the political process which involved the three Soledad Brothers—George
Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as well as Angela Davis and a host of other blacks now behind
prison bars in the U.S.A.
NOTE: George Jackson also authored Blood In My Eye which was published posthumously, or after this article
was written.
NOTE: Biography of the articles author
WALTER RODNEY: A BIOGRAPHY
Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23, 1942. His was a working class family-his
father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. After attending primary school, he won an open
exhibition scholarship to attend Queens College as one of the early working-class beneficiaries of
concessions made in the filed of education by the ruling class in Guyana to the new nationalism that
gripped the country in the early 1950s.
While at Queens College young Rodney excelled academically, as well as in the fields of athletics and
debating. In 1960, he won an open scholarship to further his studies at the University of the West Indies
in Jamaica. He graduated with a first-class honors degree in history in 1963 and. he won an open
scholarship to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1966, at the age of 24 he was
awarded a Ph.D. with honors in African History.
His doctoral research on slavery on the Upper
Guinea Coast was the result of long meticulous work on the records of Portuguese
merchants both in England and in Portugal.
In the process he learned Portuguese and Spanish which along with the French he had learned at Queens
College made him somewhat of a linguist.
In 1970, his Ph.D dissertation was published by Oxford University Press under the title, A History of the
Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800. This work was to set a trend for Rodney in both challenging the
assumptions of western historians about African history and setting new standards for looking at the
history of oppressed peoples. According to Horace Campbell "This work was path-breaking in the way in
which it analyzed the impact of slavery on the communities and the interrelationship between societies of
the region and on the ecology of the region."
Walter took up his first teaching appointment in Tanzania before returning to his alma mater, the
University of the West Indies, in 1968. This was a period of great political activity in the Caribbean as the
countries begun their post colonial journey. But it was the Black Power Movement that caught Walter's
imagination.
Some new voices had begun to question the direction of the post-independence governments, in particular
their attitude to the plight of the downpressed. The issue of empowerment for the black and brown poor of
the region was being debated among the progressive intellectuals. Rodney, who from very early on had
rejected the authoritarian role of the middle class political elite in the Caribbean, was central to this
debate. He, however, did not confine his activities to the university campus. He took his message of Black
Liberation to the gullies of Jamaica. In particular he shared his knowledge of African history with one of
the most rejected section of the Jamaican society-the Rastafarians.
Walter had shown an interest in political activism ever since he was a student in Jamaica and England.
Horace Campbell reports that while at UWI Walter "was active in student politics and campaigned
extensively in 1961 in the Jamaica Referendum on the West Indian Federation." While studying in London,
Walter participated in discussion circles, spoke at the famous Hyde Park and, participated in a symposium
on Guyana in 1965. It was during this period that Walter came into contact with the legendary CLR James
and was one of his most devoted students.
By the summer of 1968 Rodney's "groundings with the working poor of Jamaica had begun to attract the
attention of the government. So, when he attended a Black Writers' Conference in Montreal, Canada, in
October 1968, the Hugh Shearer-led Jamaican Labor Party Government banned him from re-entering the
country. This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed
and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed..
Rodney's encounters with the Rastafarians were published in a pamphlet entitled "Grounding with My
Brothers," that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.
Having been expelled from Jamaica, Walter returned to Tanzania after a short stay in Cuba. There he
lectured from 1968 to 1974 and continued his groundings in Tanzania and other parts of Africa. This was
the period of the African liberation struggles and Walter, who fervently believed that the intellectual
should make his or her skills available for the struggles and emancipation of the people, became deeply
involved. It was from partly from these activities that his second major work, and his best known --How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa - emerged. It was published by Bogle-L'Ouverture, in London, in
conjunction with Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972.
This Tanzanian period was perhaps the most important in the formation of Rodney's ideas. According to
Horace Campbell "Here he was at the forefront of establishing an intellectual tradition which still today
makes Dar es Salaam one of the centers of discussion of African politics and history. Out of he dialogue,
discussions and study groups he deepened the Marxist tradition with respect to African politics, class
struggle, the race question, African history and the role of the exploited in social change. It was within the
context of these discussions that the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was written."
Page 4 of 5
8/24/2005
Campbell also reports that " In he same period, he wrote the critical articles on Tanzanian Ujamaa,
imperialism, on underdevelopment, and the problems of state and class formation in Africa. Many of his
articles which were written in Tanzania appeared in Maji Maji, the discussion journal of the TANU Youth
League at the University. He worked in the Tanzanian archives on the question of forced labor, the
policing of the countryside and the colonial economy. This work-- " World War II and the Tanzanian
Economy"-- was later published as a monograph by Cornell University in 1976".
Rodney also developed a reputation as a Pan-Africanist theoretician and spokes person. Campbell says
that "In Tanzania he developed close political relationships with those who were struggling to change the
external control of Africa He was very close to some of the leaders of liberation movements in Africa and
also to political leaders of popular organizations of independent territories. Together with other Pan-
Africanists he participated in discussing leading up to the Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Tanzania,
1974. Before the Congress he wrote a piece: "Towards the Sixth Pan-African Congress: Aspects of the
International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America."
In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of
Guyana, but the government rescinded the appointment. But Rodney remained in Guyana, joined the
newly formed political group, the Working People's Alliance. Between 1974 and his assassination in 1980,
he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian PNC
government. He gives public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political
consciousness in the country. During this period he developed his ideas on the self emancipation of the
working people, People's Power, and multiracial democracy.
On July 11, 1979, Walter, together with seven others, was arrested following the burning down of two
government offices. He, along with Drs Rupert Roopnarine and Omawale, was later charged with arson.
From that period up to the time of his murder, he was constantly persecuted and harassed and at least on
one occasion, an attempt was made to kill him. Finally, on the evening of June 13, 1980, he was
assassinated by a bomb in the middle of Georgetown.
Walter was married to Dr Patricia Rodney and the union bore three children- Shaka, Kanini and Asha.
Organization
To have a Party, or a church or any kind of institution, organization, or the Party in this case, functions, as well as how effective the administrators are. We attempt to apply the administrative skills of our grass-roots organization to the problems that are the most frequently heard in the community.
History shows that most of the parties that have led people out of their difficulties have had administrators with what we sometimes call the traits of the bourgeoisie or declassed intellectuals. They are the people who have gone through the established institutions, rejected them, and then applied their skills to the community. In applying them to the community, their skills are no longer bourgeoisie skills but people’s skills, which are transformed through the contradiction of applying what is usually bourgeoisie to the oppressed. That itself is a kind of transformation.
History shows that most of the parties that have led people out of their difficulties have had administrators with what we sometimes call the traits of the bourgeoisie or declassed intellectuals. They are the people who have gone through the established institutions, rejected them, and then applied their skills to the community. In applying them to the community, their skills are no longer bourgeoisie skills but people’s skills, which are transformed through the contradiction of applying what is usually bourgeoisie to the oppressed. That itself is a kind of transformation.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Injustice is not blind- Scheme Magazine
Read this article on www.schememag.com
This and much much more ;o)
INJUSTICE IS NOT BLIND: The Role of White Supremist Ideology in use of the Death Penalty Against the Black and Poor.
Daily News > Critical Minded > 005 > – Apr 12, 2007 – by Elliot Milner
I. INTRODUCTION
Throughout its long history as a form of punishment in the United States, the death penalty has been overwhelmingly and disproportionately used against minorities, specifically those of African descent, and the impoverished. Whether for murder (the only crime that warrants the death penalty in present times) or for rape (which at one time could justify the death penalty) the death penalty has been used as a tool to take the lives of Black people and the poor. In cases involving the death penalty, the defendant facing the loss not only of his or her freedom, but life, is often provided the sparsest of defenses. Public defenders who lack the resources or skill to handle a death penalty case, or who are completely incompetent and uncaring to the plight of their client. Attorneys who come to court drunk, fall asleep while in court, or who fail to question key witnesses who could provide pertinent information to the case. These are just a few of the many obstacles that are disproportionately faced by Black and poor people facing the death penalty.
In this paper, I will discuss the role that white supremacist ideology plays in the use of the death penalty against Black people. I will begin with a brief overview of some of the statistical data that shows the clear disparity that exist in the application of the death penalty based on the race of the victim, the race of the accused, or both. I will then address the various major arguments against use of the death penalty in general. These arguments include, but are not limited to, issues of racial disparity. Also addressed will be the judicial response (or lack of response) to statistical data showing a clear pattern of discrimination in various phases of the death penalty process. This will include a historical background to the death penalty, including its connection to slavery and post-abolition lynching. In conclusion, I will address different remedies that have been proposed by various scholars and legal minds, mainly moratorium and abolition of the death penalty.
II. DISPARITIES IN DEATH PENALTY STATISTICS
Records for the death penalty in the United States in modern times began being kept in 1930. Of the 4,459 people executed between 1930-1999, 2,279 were Black (1). Between 1930-1967, 445 people were executed for the crime of rape. Of that number, 90% of those executed were Black. Between 1930-1967, three out of five executions that took place in the United States happened in a southern state, and a disproportionate number of executions still are performed in the South. As of March, 2007, of 1066 executions, 874 took place in Southern states. Presently, forty jurisdictions in the United States have capital punishment statutes (38 states, the federal government and the U.S. military). Twelve states and the District of Columbia do not have statutes. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed the most people with 387. Virginia is a distant second with 98. Kansas, New Jersey, New Hampshire, South Dakota, New York, and the military haven’t had any executions since 1976. Approximately 98% of those on death row are males. Black people comprise about 41% of the death row population, Hispanics approximately 11%, and whites 45%.
In 1972, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional by the decision in Furman v. Georgia, which declared that the application of the death penalty was ‘arbitrary and capricious’, and was discriminatory in its application to racial minorities and the poor. In 1976, three cases paved the way for the reintroduction of the death penalty, however with new rules and regulations intended to eliminate discrimination in its application. Gregg v. Georgia, Jurek v. Texas, and Proffitt v. Florida, all called for ‘guided discretion’ in death penalty cases. They stated that courts could impose the death penalty only for specified crimes, and that any death penalty trial must include a two-tiered trial system. One trial being to determine guilt or innocence, and a second trial to determine whether the convicted person should live or die. Woodson v. North Carolina and Roberts v. Louisiana declared invalid mandatory death penalty laws in 21 states, which did not allow any room for jury or judicial discretion beyond the determination that the person was guilty. Meaning that under these old laws, if a person were convicted of capital murder, they were automatically sentenced to death without a second trial to present evidence to help save their life. Despite these changes in law, the discriminatory and disproportionate application of the death penalty towards Blacks and the poor persists. This is based on a variety of factors, mainly focused on the dominant white perspective, and the differing values placed on white and Black life.
III. ARGUMENTS AGAINST DEATH
There are many key arguments that opponents of the death penalty make to show why it should be eliminated. The main general arguments are:
1. The death penalty is generally unfair. It has never in its modern usage been applied fairly across race, class, and gender lines.
2. The death penalty risks killing innocent people. Since 1976, more than 100 prisoners sentenced to death have been released from death row or found completely innocent for various reasons. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973, over 120 people have been set free from death row due to evidence proving them innocent(). There are many people on death row who are facing death based on the word of a single witness, some of whom received benefits for their testimony, or based on a single eye-witness.
3. The death penalty punishes the poor. The poor are often represented by unprepared, overworked, often token defenders, who don’t have the resources, time, and sometimes skill, to adequately defend a death penalty case. There are documented instances of defense lawyers in death row cases coming to court drunk, falling asleep during trial, and failing to question key witnesses.
4. The death penalty is racially biased. Black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty in any case, particularly if the victim is white, and anyone who is convicted of the capital murder of a white person is 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death.
5. The death penalty is even opposed by growing numbers of victims families. Many victims families and organizations representing the victims of murders, including Journey of Hope and Murdered Victims Families for Reconciliation, are against the death penalty as a form of punishment for those convicted of killing their loved ones.
6. The death penalty cost more than life in prison. Kansas and North Carolina did studies which showed that the cost of a capital case and the cost of carrying out a death penalty were both more expensive than there non-death case counterparts.
7. The death penalty is not a deterrent to crime. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, 80% of all executions in the United States have taken place in the South. On the other hand, the Northeastern section of the United States, which has the lowest murder rate of any section of the country, has accounted for only 1% of executions. A 1995 Hart Research Poll of police chiefs found that the majority of those chiefs interviewed did not believe that the death penalty was an effective method of reducing violent crime. Of all the options, the death penalty came in last, with barely 1% support, behind other options as reducing drug abuse, better economy/jobs, simplifying court rules, and longer prison sentences(death penalty info.org, 2007).
8. The death penalty is not used in the majority of countries around the world. Most countries have either discarded the death penalty as a means of punishment based on its barbaric nature, or never utilized it to punish crimes.
9. The same ‘arbitrariness and capriciousness’ that caused the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional in 1972 still exists. Courts on the federal and state level have seemingly taken a ‘head in the sand’ approach to dealing, or not dealing, with issues of discrimination and disparities relating to the death penalty, ignoring statistics that clearly show racial and class discrimination in its application.
Looking at things in the larger historical context, it is easier to see why issues of discrimination persist in the application of the death penalty to Blacks and the poor. The death penalty in many ways is a direct descendant of lynching and other racial violence directed mainly at minorities, specifically African descendants. Lynching was largely based on the view of Black people as being inferior, even not completely human. The value given to a Black life was far beneath that given to a white life, by the judicial system and by society at large. The former Southern laws concerning rape are one glaring example of this disparity. At one time, a Black man convicted of raping a white woman was automatically sentenced to death; a white man could be sentenced from two to twenty years; any man convicted of raping a Black woman, however, was subject to only a fine, and imprisonment if the judge felt it necessary, which was a rarity. The death penalty for rape was declared unconstitutional by Coker v. Georgia, which declared that the punishment of death for rape was disproportionate to the crime committed. At the time the decision in Coker was handed down, there were 20 people on death row for rape in Georgia; 3 were white, and 17 were Black. Early on, following the end of Jim Crow, the death penalty became officially a form of ‘legal lynching’; a way that Blacks could be punished as the white majority saw fit, however still maintaining the appearance of civility and fairness to the outside world. Lynch mobs and public lynching were unorganized and attracted lots of negative publicity. In order to appease the mob mentality, the legal systems in many southern areas began to have quick, staged trials, in which the ultimate outcome would still be death.
The decision to seek the death penalty in capital murder cases is completely arbitrary, meaning it is at the discretion of the district attorneys office whether to seek death or life imprisonment. It is said that certain mitigating or aggravating factors (I.e. multiple victims, torture, multiple wounds, murder in addition to another felony, etc.) must be present to warrant the death penalty, however this rule is also applied very loosely and ambiguously. A study by the Death Penalty Information Center stated that being Black was a more significant mitigating factor in getting the death penalty than a murder committed with another felony, murder with multiple wounds, and causing great harm, fear, or pain(). A member of the Georgia Board of Paroles and Pardons said that if he were to take the files of 100 cases punished by life, and 100 cases punished by death, and mixed them up and threw them on a table, it would be nearly impossible to determine which cases got which punishment based on the facts within the files.
Although approximately half of the murder victims in the United States each year are people of African descent, 85% of those sentenced to death were sentenced to death for murdering white people. Few people familiar with the state of race relations in the United States today would deny that there is a risk of racial prejudice influencing the sentencing decision in the typical capital case: a Black defendant facing the death penalty for the murder of a prominent white person who is prosecuted by a white prosecutor before a white judge and an all-white or predominantly white jury. The likelihood of racial prejudice influencing whether the death penalty is sought by the prosecutor or imposed by the jury is even greater if other factors are present, such as the rape of a white woman. The United States Supreme Court has observed, “A juror who believes that Blacks are violence prone or morally inferior might well be influenced by that belief in deciding whether the crime involved aggravating factors ….” In addition, a juror’s racial biases might prevent him or her from considering evidence about the life and background of the accused in mitigation. The Court pointed out, for example, that “such a juror might also be less favorably inclined toward the defendant’s evidence of mental disturbance as a mitigating circumstance.”
The Supreme Court also observed that “more subtle, less consciously held racial attitudes” - unconscious racism - “could also influence a juror’s decision in the case. “For example, “fear of blacks, which could easily be stirred up by the violent facts of the crime, might incline a juror to favor the death penalty.” Although the Supreme Court spoke of jurors, racial prejudice is not limited to jurors. Law enforcement officials, prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, and court officials may have racial biases which influence their attitudes toward crimes and those accused, as well as their exercise of discretion in the process leading to imposition of a death sentence.
A prosecutor who believes that “Blacks are violence prone or morally inferior” may be less likely to seek the death penalty in cases involving Black victims and more likely to seek the death penalty in cases involving Black defendants. A prosecutor’s unconscious racism, his or her fear or misunderstanding of people of a different race or culture, may well be “stirred up” in a case involving an interracial crime and influence the prosecutor to seek the death penalty in that case, but not in similar cases that are not interracial. A judge with similar attitudes may fail to recognize or correct racial discrimination by prosecutors in selecting juries, in seeking the death penalty, or in presenting evidence or argument. A defense lawyer who has racial biases may not spend enough time with the client or the client’s family to discover mitigating evidence. A Black client may be seen as “arrogant” or “uncooperative” due to the lawyer’s racial stereotypes. A lawyer may not diligently try to save the life of one believed to be inferior. Racial discrimination often influences the capital sentencing decision in other ways as well. Members of racial minorities continue to be excluded as judges, jurors, prosecutors, lawyers, and law enforcement officials in the criminal justice system. A member of a racial minority who is also poor faces the disadvantage in a capital prosecution of being represented by a court-appointed lawyer. In many states, defense lawyers are appointed by elected trial judges, many of whom are former prosecutors who won positions on the bench after prosecuting high publicity capital cases. Often, court-appointed lawyers lack the knowledge, skill, resources, sensitivity and inclination to handle the case. These lawyers may fail to recognize and challenge the role that race plays in determining who dies.
While it is difficult to measure precisely the extent to which race influences decision-making in any particular capital case, only those oblivious to the brutal history of racial discrimination in American law would deny the danger of racial prejudice entering the decisions which lead to the imposition of a death sentence. However, instead of undertaking the challenge of minimizing or eliminating the potential for racial prejudice in these highly subjective and emotional decisions, courts and legislatures have been largely indifferent to the influence of race in the infliction of the death penalty. Despite pronounced racial disparities in the infliction of the death penalty in both state and federal capital cases, Congress and state legislatures have failed to limit application of the death penalty or provide remedies for racial discrimination, such as the Racial Justice Act.
Instead of acknowledging the risk of racial discrimination and attempting to identify and eliminate it, both federal and state courts frequently dodge the inquiry. They deny the existence of racial discrimination that is apparent to everyone, employ legal fictions that have no relation to the reality of race relations in America today, set legal standards or burdens of proof that are impossible to meet, or provide wholly inadequate remedies for discrimination that is undeniable. All this may be done while the courts are issuing sweeping pronouncements denouncing the evil of racial discrimination and proclaiming their unceasing efforts to cure it. One prominent federal appellate judge observed that the failure of the courts to remedy instances of racial discrimination has sent the message that federal courts, which once offered the greatest hope to the nation’s minorities, are “no longer interested in protecting the rights of minorities.”
Despite the racial discrimination which has been a major aspect of the death penalty throughout American history, the Supreme Court and lower federal and state courts have been reluctant to face racial issues presented by capital cases. The courts have simply been in a state of denial instead of confronting and dealing with the difficult and sensitive issue of race.
After declaring racially discriminatory jury selection practices in one Georgia county unconstitutional, the United States Supreme Court remanded to the Georgia Supreme Court a capital case in which the jury had been selected by the same illegal means in the same county. However, when the Georgia Supreme Court refused to reconsider its previous holding that the issue had been waived, the United States Supreme Court backed down, denied certiorari and allowed the execution to be carried out. It appears that the Court, already encountering resistance to its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, did not want anymore confrontations with southern state courts over racial discrimination in the criminal courts. Over ten years later, the United States Supreme Court appeared willing to review the role of racial prejudice in capital cases when it granted certiorari in Maxwell v. Bishop, a case in which the Eighth Circuit rejected a challenge based upon the pronounced disparity in the number of Black people sentenced to death for rape in Arkansas and other parts of the South. However, after twice hearing oral argument devoted mostly to the issue of racial discrimination, the Court vacated the death sentence and remanded the case based upon a jury qualification issue which had not even been raised in the Court of Appeals, completely ignoring the racial discrimination aspects of the oral arguments.
Although the appearance of race discrimination was acknowledged by justices in both the majority and the dissent in Furman v. Georgia, only Justice Marshall discussed racial discrimination at length. Justice Stewart found it unnecessary to discuss the issue, while acknowledging that “if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissibly basis of race.”
Despite the extraordinary history of discrimination with regard to the infliction of the death penalty upon Black men for the rape of white women, the Court did not even mention race in striking down the death penalty for the crime of rape in Coker v. Georgia. It is impossible to know how many state courts have found ways to avoid the issue of race in deciding capital cases. The Georgia Supreme Court frequently discusses every issue presented to it, even those which need not be addressed for a decision. But in holding that a trial judge should be recused from a case because of his involvement in opposing a motion to disqualify him, the court never mentioned the motion was based on the judge’s long history of racial discrimination. Evidence presented in the trial court established that the judge regularly appointed jury commissions which underrepresented Black people, tolerated gross under representation of Blacks in the grand and trial juries, mistreated Black attorneys in court, used racial slurs, and practiced discrimination in his personal life.
The Missouri Supreme Court summarily reversed two capital cases without mentioning evidence that prosecutors in Kansas City used racial slurs to refer to Black citizens, systematically excluded black citizens from juries, and refused to plea bargain with Blacks charged with murders of whites while offering plea bargains in all other potential capital cases, including a case of murderers who killed four generations of a Black family. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals similarly failed to acknowledge or discuss disturbing evidence of racial discrimination in setting aside a capital conviction and sentence. The court did not mention that the prosecutor had used twenty-six peremptory jury strikes against Blacks after dividing potential jurors into four lists under the headings, “strong,” “medium,” “weak” and “black” or that the trial court had held there was no discrimination.
Apparently, many courts believe it is best to avoid the sensitive issue of race. Why else did the courts not denounce these blatant examples of racial discrimination in the strongest terms? While the failure of the appellate courts to mention the race issues in these cases may have been coincidence, it is more likely that courts are defensive about the racial discrimination that takes place in what is supposed to be a system of equal justice. Their opinions leave those who read them without any hint that the cases involved racial discrimination and thus provide trial courts with no guidance in considering those issues. In addition, lawyers reading appellate opinions are less likely to realize the importance of race and search out and challenge discrimination. The failure of the courts to discuss and condemn racial discrimination only fosters more discrimination.
Poor people accused of capital crimes are often defended by lawyers who lack the skills, resources, and commitment to handle such serious matters. This fact is confirmed in case after case. It is not the facts of the crime, but the quality of legal representation, that distinguishes this case, where the death penalty was imposed, from many similar cases, where it was not.
Inadequate legal representation does not occur in just a few capital cases. It is pervasive in those jurisdictions which account for most of the death sentences. The American Bar Association concluded after an exhaustive study of the issues that “the inadequacy and inadequate compensation of counsel at trial” was one of the “principal failings of the capital punishment systems in the states today.” Justice Thurgood Marshall observed that “capital defendants frequently suffer the consequences of having trial counsel who are ill equipped to handle capital cases.” The National Law Journal, after an extensive study of capital cases in six Southern states, found that capital trials are “more like a random flip of the coin than a delicate balancing of the scales” because the defense lawyer is too often “ill trained, unprepared . . . and grossly underpaid.” Many observers from a variety of perspectives and from different states have found the same scandalous quality of legal representation.
These assessments are supported by numerous cases in which the poor were defended by lawyers who lacked even the most rudimentary knowledge, resources, and capabilities needed for the defense of a capital case. Death sentences have been imposed in cases in which defense lawyers had not even read the state’s death penalty statute or did not know that a capital trial is split into separate determinations of guilt and punishment. State trial judges and prosecutors who have taken oaths to uphold the law, including the Sixth Amendment, have allowed capital trials to proceed and death sentences to be imposed even when defense counsel fought among themselves or presented conflicting defenses for the same client, referred to their clients by a racial slur, cross-examined a witness whose direct testimony counsel missed because he was parking his car, slept through part of the trial, or was intoxicated during trial. Appellate courts often review and decide capital cases on the basis of appellate briefs that would be rejected in a first-year legal writing course in law school.
There are several interrelated reasons for the poor quality of representation in these important cases. Most fundamental is the inadequate funding for the defense of the poor and mostly Black. As a result, there is simply no functioning adversary system in many states. Public defender programs have never been created or properly funded in many jurisdictions. The compensation provided to individual court-appointed lawyers is so minimal that few accomplished lawyers can be enticed to defend capital cases. Those who do take a capital case cannot afford to devote the time required to defend it properly. As a result, the accused are usually represented by lawyers who lack the experience, expertise, and resources of their adversaries on the prosecution side.
Many state court judges, instead of correcting this imbalance, foster it by intentionally appointing inexperienced and incapable lawyers to defend capital cases, and denying funding for essential expert and investigative needs of the defense. The minimal standard of legal representation in the defense of Black and poor people, as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court, offers little protection to the person stuck with a bad lawyer.
IV. CRITICAL RACE ANALYSIS OF DEATH DETERMINATION
Even in death penalty cases in which the jury is comprised of more than a token Black representative (or none at all), the effects of the dominant white privileged way of thought can still be seen and felt. Due to the influence and pressures of the constant racism faced by Black people in society, many find it easier to “join them”, instead of try to beat them; meaning that they choose to attempt to mimic and align themselves with the ideology of white supremacy of the dominant majority. This is done in an effort to become more acceptable to, and possibly even find favor from, the white people whom they observe in most of the positions of power in our society. This phenomenon can be observed in the words and actions of many of the Black people who do manage to make it into the criminal justice process, whether it is the arresting officer, prosecuting attorney, public defender, judge, or even juror. In his essay, “Death in Whiteface”, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner refers to this as whiteface, which he defines as “…the purchase of an ideology or broad belief system grounded in the belief that nonwhite or “white trash” others are innately prone to irresponsibility and immorality.” (Ogletree and Sarat, 2006).
This falls right in line with the Critical Race Theorist view that objectivity in the criminal justice system, and legal system as a whole, is an illusion. ‘Objective’, as it applies here, actually means the values and beliefs of those who are born with the property of whiteness, and all the benefits and protections thereof. Given the ‘innate inferiority and immorality’ of Black people, it is the duty of those within the legal system to be the protectors of those with property (White, wealthy), from those without (Black, poor). This is the status quo, the standard point-of-view, from which all decisions within the legal system are made. Several polls of racial attitudes in recent years have shown that most white people do not consider racial discrimination the cause of Black inequality. If not racial discrimination, then what? The answer is painfully obvious, although it is usually never spoken by ‘intelligent’ white people, except possibly in coded language: They believe that the true reason for Black inequality is the natural, innate inferiority of Black people. Although manifested differently by Conservatives and Liberals, Northerners and Southerners, Democrats and Republicans, this is still the belief of the dominate white majority in this country. And since the laws and rules that govern this country are made by white people, for the preservation of white supremacy, it is clear to see why the death penalty continues to be applied in the manner that it is. If Blacks are considered naturally inferior, then by default that would imply the natural superiority, or supremacy, of white people, and ultimately the supremacy of white life over Black life. For anyone not a follower of the dominant white supremacist ideology (as a white person or Black person who accepts the ‘whiteface’), the methods utilized to justify and maintain white dominance range from laughable to psychopathic. For example, it is often used as an excuse to justify lynching, and even slavery, that the white men and women who participated in cruel and inhuman behavior were just ‘people of their time’, not animals, insane, or somehow lacking mentally. No, they were good, honest, loving, God-fearing people, who due to the time they grew up in, decided to burn Black people alive and shoot their already dead bodies; to rape Black women and keep their own children as slaves; to cut pregnant Black women’s stomachs open, pull the child out, and bash its skull; to hang and castrate Black men for the capital offense of looking at a white woman, all while having a picnic of sandwiches and fruit. They were lovely people. However, Black people, who for years were enslaved, had families torn apart, were denied education of any kind, suffered torture and murder at random, and even following the abolition of slavery, were and are hindered from equality and advancement by various tactics, lynched, and forced into crowded ghettos, are innately inferior?
Viewing the death penalty from the perspective of white supremacy, it is a well oiled machine that does exactly what it is intended to do: Not only allow, but promote the value of white life over Black life. Those Blacks in the criminal justice system, and those facing murder charges particularly, are the lowest of the low, as Derrick Bell referred to as “the faces at the bottom of the well.” In addition, they are viewed as the biggest threat to white supremacy, due to their unwillingness, or perceived inability, to accept the ‘whiteface’, and be assimilated into the white supremacist ideology. White supremacy in its present-day form has far less to do with skin color and far more to do with the mentality, the ideology, of the individual. A Black person, who is non-assimilated, and accused of murder, is a threat. But a Black person, who is non-assimilated, and is accused of the murder of a white person, is not only a threat, but must be killed, utilizing the well-oiled machine, and with all appearances of propriety. Despite what the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts throughout the United States have said, or chosen not to address, the evidence of discrimination and racism is apparent. According to the Baldus study, one of the most comprehensive studies done on disparities in the death penalty, in 96% of states where reviews of race and the death penalty have been done, there was a pattern of either race-of-defendant or race-of-victim discrimination, or both(Baldus report to the ABA, 1998). The statistical data speaks for itself, and is overwhelming. It is no surprise that the majority of white people support a legal system that serves and protects their interest, and severely punishes those mostly Black and poor individuals who do not accept or understand their ‘proper place’ in this white supremacist society. The question is why do a large number of Black people, who have suffered the most at the hands of the U.S. legal system, and have seen the way that it is used to promote and preserve white supremacy, still support it? As with most things, the death penalty cannot be looked at in a vacuum. It must be looked at in the context of history, and any analysis of it must include the connections the death penalty and legal system have with other areas of society.
What are often classified as conscious and unconscious racism both play prominent roles in the use of the death penalty among poor Black people. Conscious racism is most often viewed as the blatant words, ways, and actions that show hatred or disdain for a particular race, and a desire to keep people from that race subjugated. Examples of this would be use of ‘hate’ words such as nigger or monkey in reference to Black people; openly discriminatory practices based on race, such as exclusion of Black people from certain neighborhoods, jobs, or clubs, with that being expressed openly; acts of violence, or manipulation of the legal system to unfairly punish Black people, in which the role of race is not hidden, but openly expressed. Unconscious racism is considered to deal with the more deeply ingrained set of values, beliefs, and prejudices that shape the views of a person towards another person or group of people. These ingrained ideas are not manifested in clear and obvious racist action, but in more subtle ways that on the surface may appear race-neutral. Examples of this would be the use of peremptory strikes to remove virtually all Blacks from a jury, with various excuses given for this, none directly addressing the race of the potential juror. Another example would be the requirement of “exceptionally clear proof” to sustain a claim of racial discrimination in infliction of the death penalty under the Equal Protection Clause, which basically requires an unrealistic and ridiculous situation where a decision maker in the judicial process has to in some way openly say or show that they pursued the death penalty against a Black defendant based on race. Although individual Justices have acknowledge the impact that unconscious, or subtle racism, can play in the death penalty decision-making process, the Supreme Court, and other courts as a whole, have chosen to ignore the evidence showing disparities in death penalty application, and allowed the executions of Black people who at the very least raised reasonable doubt as to their innocence. Just as a single Black juror may be influenced by threats and harassment by 11 other white jurors, and cast a vote in favor of death even though they don’t feel it is warranted, others in the death penalty cycle are influenced by outside forces as well. Police chiefs, many of whom know that the death penalty is not a significant deterrent to crime, still may push for its use so as to appear that they are tough on crime. The same applies to prosecutors, who don’t want their usually white constituents to think that they are not interested in protected their property and more valuable lives.
V. CONCLUSION
There are really two basic schools of thought concerning the use of the death penalty and the obvious disparities that exist in its application: Those who think that the problem is fixable, through legislation and judicial reform, and those who think the problem is permanent, and cannot be fixed. Those who think that the problem is fixable propose a national moratorium for the death penalty, so that the problems of race that seem to be inherent in it can be addressed and dealt with. There is not much evidence or information as to how this temporary stoppage of the death penalty will differ from the one that took place in 1972, especially given that a majority of the problem is unconscious racism, or at the very least racism that will not be obvious or easily detected. I tend to support the other option, which is total abolition of the death penalty within the United States as it stands at present. The impact of racism is too prevalent and difficult to detect, especially given the legal standards of proof needed, the disparities too great, and the risk of taking more innocent lives too likely, to continue the process as it exists at present. The death penalty is irrevocable; once a person is dead, they’re dead, nothing can bring them back. Those who accept the fact that innocent people are executed, most of whom are Black and poor, are simply wearers of the same whiteface that produced the system in the first place. The death penalty should not be considered as a form of punishment until the long oppressed voices and viewpoints of Black people and other poor people are heard and considered of equal importance, if then.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Law Review Articles
1. Charles R. Lawrence III, The Id, The Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning With Unconscious Racism, 39 Stanford L. Rev. 317(1987).
2. Stephen B. Bright, Discrimination, Death, and Denial: The Tolerance of Discrimination in Infliction of the Death Penalty, 35 Santa Clara L. Rev.433 (1995).
3. Carlton Waterhouse, Avoiding Another Step In a Series of Unfortunate Legal Events: A Consideration of Black Life Under American Law from 1619 to 1972 and A Challenge to Prevailing Notions of Legally Based Reparations, 26 B.C. Third World L.J. 207 (2006).
4. Kimberle’ Williams Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331 (1988).
5. Stephen B. Bright, Counsel For The Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer, 103 Yale L.J. 1835 (1994).
6. Susan Bandes, Simple Murder: A Comment on the Legality of Executing the Innocent, 44 Buff. L. Rev. 501(1996).
Books
1. Paul D. Carrington and Trina Jones, Law and Class in America (2006).
2. Ronald W. Walters, White Nationalism, Black Interests- Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community (2003).
3. David Cole, No Equal Justice (1999).
4. Silvana Siddali, From Property to Person (2005).
5. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (2006).
Websites
1. Amnesty International-http://web.amnesty.org/library.
2. Center on Wrongful Convictions- www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions.
3. The Innocence Project- www.innocenceproject.org.
This and much much more ;o)
INJUSTICE IS NOT BLIND: The Role of White Supremist Ideology in use of the Death Penalty Against the Black and Poor.
Daily News > Critical Minded > 005 > – Apr 12, 2007 – by Elliot Milner
I. INTRODUCTION
Throughout its long history as a form of punishment in the United States, the death penalty has been overwhelmingly and disproportionately used against minorities, specifically those of African descent, and the impoverished. Whether for murder (the only crime that warrants the death penalty in present times) or for rape (which at one time could justify the death penalty) the death penalty has been used as a tool to take the lives of Black people and the poor. In cases involving the death penalty, the defendant facing the loss not only of his or her freedom, but life, is often provided the sparsest of defenses. Public defenders who lack the resources or skill to handle a death penalty case, or who are completely incompetent and uncaring to the plight of their client. Attorneys who come to court drunk, fall asleep while in court, or who fail to question key witnesses who could provide pertinent information to the case. These are just a few of the many obstacles that are disproportionately faced by Black and poor people facing the death penalty.
In this paper, I will discuss the role that white supremacist ideology plays in the use of the death penalty against Black people. I will begin with a brief overview of some of the statistical data that shows the clear disparity that exist in the application of the death penalty based on the race of the victim, the race of the accused, or both. I will then address the various major arguments against use of the death penalty in general. These arguments include, but are not limited to, issues of racial disparity. Also addressed will be the judicial response (or lack of response) to statistical data showing a clear pattern of discrimination in various phases of the death penalty process. This will include a historical background to the death penalty, including its connection to slavery and post-abolition lynching. In conclusion, I will address different remedies that have been proposed by various scholars and legal minds, mainly moratorium and abolition of the death penalty.
II. DISPARITIES IN DEATH PENALTY STATISTICS
Records for the death penalty in the United States in modern times began being kept in 1930. Of the 4,459 people executed between 1930-1999, 2,279 were Black (1). Between 1930-1967, 445 people were executed for the crime of rape. Of that number, 90% of those executed were Black. Between 1930-1967, three out of five executions that took place in the United States happened in a southern state, and a disproportionate number of executions still are performed in the South. As of March, 2007, of 1066 executions, 874 took place in Southern states. Presently, forty jurisdictions in the United States have capital punishment statutes (38 states, the federal government and the U.S. military). Twelve states and the District of Columbia do not have statutes. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed the most people with 387. Virginia is a distant second with 98. Kansas, New Jersey, New Hampshire, South Dakota, New York, and the military haven’t had any executions since 1976. Approximately 98% of those on death row are males. Black people comprise about 41% of the death row population, Hispanics approximately 11%, and whites 45%.
In 1972, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional by the decision in Furman v. Georgia, which declared that the application of the death penalty was ‘arbitrary and capricious’, and was discriminatory in its application to racial minorities and the poor. In 1976, three cases paved the way for the reintroduction of the death penalty, however with new rules and regulations intended to eliminate discrimination in its application. Gregg v. Georgia, Jurek v. Texas, and Proffitt v. Florida, all called for ‘guided discretion’ in death penalty cases. They stated that courts could impose the death penalty only for specified crimes, and that any death penalty trial must include a two-tiered trial system. One trial being to determine guilt or innocence, and a second trial to determine whether the convicted person should live or die. Woodson v. North Carolina and Roberts v. Louisiana declared invalid mandatory death penalty laws in 21 states, which did not allow any room for jury or judicial discretion beyond the determination that the person was guilty. Meaning that under these old laws, if a person were convicted of capital murder, they were automatically sentenced to death without a second trial to present evidence to help save their life. Despite these changes in law, the discriminatory and disproportionate application of the death penalty towards Blacks and the poor persists. This is based on a variety of factors, mainly focused on the dominant white perspective, and the differing values placed on white and Black life.
III. ARGUMENTS AGAINST DEATH
There are many key arguments that opponents of the death penalty make to show why it should be eliminated. The main general arguments are:
1. The death penalty is generally unfair. It has never in its modern usage been applied fairly across race, class, and gender lines.
2. The death penalty risks killing innocent people. Since 1976, more than 100 prisoners sentenced to death have been released from death row or found completely innocent for various reasons. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973, over 120 people have been set free from death row due to evidence proving them innocent(). There are many people on death row who are facing death based on the word of a single witness, some of whom received benefits for their testimony, or based on a single eye-witness.
3. The death penalty punishes the poor. The poor are often represented by unprepared, overworked, often token defenders, who don’t have the resources, time, and sometimes skill, to adequately defend a death penalty case. There are documented instances of defense lawyers in death row cases coming to court drunk, falling asleep during trial, and failing to question key witnesses.
4. The death penalty is racially biased. Black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty in any case, particularly if the victim is white, and anyone who is convicted of the capital murder of a white person is 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death.
5. The death penalty is even opposed by growing numbers of victims families. Many victims families and organizations representing the victims of murders, including Journey of Hope and Murdered Victims Families for Reconciliation, are against the death penalty as a form of punishment for those convicted of killing their loved ones.
6. The death penalty cost more than life in prison. Kansas and North Carolina did studies which showed that the cost of a capital case and the cost of carrying out a death penalty were both more expensive than there non-death case counterparts.
7. The death penalty is not a deterrent to crime. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, 80% of all executions in the United States have taken place in the South. On the other hand, the Northeastern section of the United States, which has the lowest murder rate of any section of the country, has accounted for only 1% of executions. A 1995 Hart Research Poll of police chiefs found that the majority of those chiefs interviewed did not believe that the death penalty was an effective method of reducing violent crime. Of all the options, the death penalty came in last, with barely 1% support, behind other options as reducing drug abuse, better economy/jobs, simplifying court rules, and longer prison sentences(death penalty info.org, 2007).
8. The death penalty is not used in the majority of countries around the world. Most countries have either discarded the death penalty as a means of punishment based on its barbaric nature, or never utilized it to punish crimes.
9. The same ‘arbitrariness and capriciousness’ that caused the death penalty to be declared unconstitutional in 1972 still exists. Courts on the federal and state level have seemingly taken a ‘head in the sand’ approach to dealing, or not dealing, with issues of discrimination and disparities relating to the death penalty, ignoring statistics that clearly show racial and class discrimination in its application.
Looking at things in the larger historical context, it is easier to see why issues of discrimination persist in the application of the death penalty to Blacks and the poor. The death penalty in many ways is a direct descendant of lynching and other racial violence directed mainly at minorities, specifically African descendants. Lynching was largely based on the view of Black people as being inferior, even not completely human. The value given to a Black life was far beneath that given to a white life, by the judicial system and by society at large. The former Southern laws concerning rape are one glaring example of this disparity. At one time, a Black man convicted of raping a white woman was automatically sentenced to death; a white man could be sentenced from two to twenty years; any man convicted of raping a Black woman, however, was subject to only a fine, and imprisonment if the judge felt it necessary, which was a rarity. The death penalty for rape was declared unconstitutional by Coker v. Georgia, which declared that the punishment of death for rape was disproportionate to the crime committed. At the time the decision in Coker was handed down, there were 20 people on death row for rape in Georgia; 3 were white, and 17 were Black. Early on, following the end of Jim Crow, the death penalty became officially a form of ‘legal lynching’; a way that Blacks could be punished as the white majority saw fit, however still maintaining the appearance of civility and fairness to the outside world. Lynch mobs and public lynching were unorganized and attracted lots of negative publicity. In order to appease the mob mentality, the legal systems in many southern areas began to have quick, staged trials, in which the ultimate outcome would still be death.
The decision to seek the death penalty in capital murder cases is completely arbitrary, meaning it is at the discretion of the district attorneys office whether to seek death or life imprisonment. It is said that certain mitigating or aggravating factors (I.e. multiple victims, torture, multiple wounds, murder in addition to another felony, etc.) must be present to warrant the death penalty, however this rule is also applied very loosely and ambiguously. A study by the Death Penalty Information Center stated that being Black was a more significant mitigating factor in getting the death penalty than a murder committed with another felony, murder with multiple wounds, and causing great harm, fear, or pain(). A member of the Georgia Board of Paroles and Pardons said that if he were to take the files of 100 cases punished by life, and 100 cases punished by death, and mixed them up and threw them on a table, it would be nearly impossible to determine which cases got which punishment based on the facts within the files.
Although approximately half of the murder victims in the United States each year are people of African descent, 85% of those sentenced to death were sentenced to death for murdering white people. Few people familiar with the state of race relations in the United States today would deny that there is a risk of racial prejudice influencing the sentencing decision in the typical capital case: a Black defendant facing the death penalty for the murder of a prominent white person who is prosecuted by a white prosecutor before a white judge and an all-white or predominantly white jury. The likelihood of racial prejudice influencing whether the death penalty is sought by the prosecutor or imposed by the jury is even greater if other factors are present, such as the rape of a white woman. The United States Supreme Court has observed, “A juror who believes that Blacks are violence prone or morally inferior might well be influenced by that belief in deciding whether the crime involved aggravating factors ….” In addition, a juror’s racial biases might prevent him or her from considering evidence about the life and background of the accused in mitigation. The Court pointed out, for example, that “such a juror might also be less favorably inclined toward the defendant’s evidence of mental disturbance as a mitigating circumstance.”
The Supreme Court also observed that “more subtle, less consciously held racial attitudes” - unconscious racism - “could also influence a juror’s decision in the case. “For example, “fear of blacks, which could easily be stirred up by the violent facts of the crime, might incline a juror to favor the death penalty.” Although the Supreme Court spoke of jurors, racial prejudice is not limited to jurors. Law enforcement officials, prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, and court officials may have racial biases which influence their attitudes toward crimes and those accused, as well as their exercise of discretion in the process leading to imposition of a death sentence.
A prosecutor who believes that “Blacks are violence prone or morally inferior” may be less likely to seek the death penalty in cases involving Black victims and more likely to seek the death penalty in cases involving Black defendants. A prosecutor’s unconscious racism, his or her fear or misunderstanding of people of a different race or culture, may well be “stirred up” in a case involving an interracial crime and influence the prosecutor to seek the death penalty in that case, but not in similar cases that are not interracial. A judge with similar attitudes may fail to recognize or correct racial discrimination by prosecutors in selecting juries, in seeking the death penalty, or in presenting evidence or argument. A defense lawyer who has racial biases may not spend enough time with the client or the client’s family to discover mitigating evidence. A Black client may be seen as “arrogant” or “uncooperative” due to the lawyer’s racial stereotypes. A lawyer may not diligently try to save the life of one believed to be inferior. Racial discrimination often influences the capital sentencing decision in other ways as well. Members of racial minorities continue to be excluded as judges, jurors, prosecutors, lawyers, and law enforcement officials in the criminal justice system. A member of a racial minority who is also poor faces the disadvantage in a capital prosecution of being represented by a court-appointed lawyer. In many states, defense lawyers are appointed by elected trial judges, many of whom are former prosecutors who won positions on the bench after prosecuting high publicity capital cases. Often, court-appointed lawyers lack the knowledge, skill, resources, sensitivity and inclination to handle the case. These lawyers may fail to recognize and challenge the role that race plays in determining who dies.
While it is difficult to measure precisely the extent to which race influences decision-making in any particular capital case, only those oblivious to the brutal history of racial discrimination in American law would deny the danger of racial prejudice entering the decisions which lead to the imposition of a death sentence. However, instead of undertaking the challenge of minimizing or eliminating the potential for racial prejudice in these highly subjective and emotional decisions, courts and legislatures have been largely indifferent to the influence of race in the infliction of the death penalty. Despite pronounced racial disparities in the infliction of the death penalty in both state and federal capital cases, Congress and state legislatures have failed to limit application of the death penalty or provide remedies for racial discrimination, such as the Racial Justice Act.
Instead of acknowledging the risk of racial discrimination and attempting to identify and eliminate it, both federal and state courts frequently dodge the inquiry. They deny the existence of racial discrimination that is apparent to everyone, employ legal fictions that have no relation to the reality of race relations in America today, set legal standards or burdens of proof that are impossible to meet, or provide wholly inadequate remedies for discrimination that is undeniable. All this may be done while the courts are issuing sweeping pronouncements denouncing the evil of racial discrimination and proclaiming their unceasing efforts to cure it. One prominent federal appellate judge observed that the failure of the courts to remedy instances of racial discrimination has sent the message that federal courts, which once offered the greatest hope to the nation’s minorities, are “no longer interested in protecting the rights of minorities.”
Despite the racial discrimination which has been a major aspect of the death penalty throughout American history, the Supreme Court and lower federal and state courts have been reluctant to face racial issues presented by capital cases. The courts have simply been in a state of denial instead of confronting and dealing with the difficult and sensitive issue of race.
After declaring racially discriminatory jury selection practices in one Georgia county unconstitutional, the United States Supreme Court remanded to the Georgia Supreme Court a capital case in which the jury had been selected by the same illegal means in the same county. However, when the Georgia Supreme Court refused to reconsider its previous holding that the issue had been waived, the United States Supreme Court backed down, denied certiorari and allowed the execution to be carried out. It appears that the Court, already encountering resistance to its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, did not want anymore confrontations with southern state courts over racial discrimination in the criminal courts. Over ten years later, the United States Supreme Court appeared willing to review the role of racial prejudice in capital cases when it granted certiorari in Maxwell v. Bishop, a case in which the Eighth Circuit rejected a challenge based upon the pronounced disparity in the number of Black people sentenced to death for rape in Arkansas and other parts of the South. However, after twice hearing oral argument devoted mostly to the issue of racial discrimination, the Court vacated the death sentence and remanded the case based upon a jury qualification issue which had not even been raised in the Court of Appeals, completely ignoring the racial discrimination aspects of the oral arguments.
Although the appearance of race discrimination was acknowledged by justices in both the majority and the dissent in Furman v. Georgia, only Justice Marshall discussed racial discrimination at length. Justice Stewart found it unnecessary to discuss the issue, while acknowledging that “if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissibly basis of race.”
Despite the extraordinary history of discrimination with regard to the infliction of the death penalty upon Black men for the rape of white women, the Court did not even mention race in striking down the death penalty for the crime of rape in Coker v. Georgia. It is impossible to know how many state courts have found ways to avoid the issue of race in deciding capital cases. The Georgia Supreme Court frequently discusses every issue presented to it, even those which need not be addressed for a decision. But in holding that a trial judge should be recused from a case because of his involvement in opposing a motion to disqualify him, the court never mentioned the motion was based on the judge’s long history of racial discrimination. Evidence presented in the trial court established that the judge regularly appointed jury commissions which underrepresented Black people, tolerated gross under representation of Blacks in the grand and trial juries, mistreated Black attorneys in court, used racial slurs, and practiced discrimination in his personal life.
The Missouri Supreme Court summarily reversed two capital cases without mentioning evidence that prosecutors in Kansas City used racial slurs to refer to Black citizens, systematically excluded black citizens from juries, and refused to plea bargain with Blacks charged with murders of whites while offering plea bargains in all other potential capital cases, including a case of murderers who killed four generations of a Black family. The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals similarly failed to acknowledge or discuss disturbing evidence of racial discrimination in setting aside a capital conviction and sentence. The court did not mention that the prosecutor had used twenty-six peremptory jury strikes against Blacks after dividing potential jurors into four lists under the headings, “strong,” “medium,” “weak” and “black” or that the trial court had held there was no discrimination.
Apparently, many courts believe it is best to avoid the sensitive issue of race. Why else did the courts not denounce these blatant examples of racial discrimination in the strongest terms? While the failure of the appellate courts to mention the race issues in these cases may have been coincidence, it is more likely that courts are defensive about the racial discrimination that takes place in what is supposed to be a system of equal justice. Their opinions leave those who read them without any hint that the cases involved racial discrimination and thus provide trial courts with no guidance in considering those issues. In addition, lawyers reading appellate opinions are less likely to realize the importance of race and search out and challenge discrimination. The failure of the courts to discuss and condemn racial discrimination only fosters more discrimination.
Poor people accused of capital crimes are often defended by lawyers who lack the skills, resources, and commitment to handle such serious matters. This fact is confirmed in case after case. It is not the facts of the crime, but the quality of legal representation, that distinguishes this case, where the death penalty was imposed, from many similar cases, where it was not.
Inadequate legal representation does not occur in just a few capital cases. It is pervasive in those jurisdictions which account for most of the death sentences. The American Bar Association concluded after an exhaustive study of the issues that “the inadequacy and inadequate compensation of counsel at trial” was one of the “principal failings of the capital punishment systems in the states today.” Justice Thurgood Marshall observed that “capital defendants frequently suffer the consequences of having trial counsel who are ill equipped to handle capital cases.” The National Law Journal, after an extensive study of capital cases in six Southern states, found that capital trials are “more like a random flip of the coin than a delicate balancing of the scales” because the defense lawyer is too often “ill trained, unprepared . . . and grossly underpaid.” Many observers from a variety of perspectives and from different states have found the same scandalous quality of legal representation.
These assessments are supported by numerous cases in which the poor were defended by lawyers who lacked even the most rudimentary knowledge, resources, and capabilities needed for the defense of a capital case. Death sentences have been imposed in cases in which defense lawyers had not even read the state’s death penalty statute or did not know that a capital trial is split into separate determinations of guilt and punishment. State trial judges and prosecutors who have taken oaths to uphold the law, including the Sixth Amendment, have allowed capital trials to proceed and death sentences to be imposed even when defense counsel fought among themselves or presented conflicting defenses for the same client, referred to their clients by a racial slur, cross-examined a witness whose direct testimony counsel missed because he was parking his car, slept through part of the trial, or was intoxicated during trial. Appellate courts often review and decide capital cases on the basis of appellate briefs that would be rejected in a first-year legal writing course in law school.
There are several interrelated reasons for the poor quality of representation in these important cases. Most fundamental is the inadequate funding for the defense of the poor and mostly Black. As a result, there is simply no functioning adversary system in many states. Public defender programs have never been created or properly funded in many jurisdictions. The compensation provided to individual court-appointed lawyers is so minimal that few accomplished lawyers can be enticed to defend capital cases. Those who do take a capital case cannot afford to devote the time required to defend it properly. As a result, the accused are usually represented by lawyers who lack the experience, expertise, and resources of their adversaries on the prosecution side.
Many state court judges, instead of correcting this imbalance, foster it by intentionally appointing inexperienced and incapable lawyers to defend capital cases, and denying funding for essential expert and investigative needs of the defense. The minimal standard of legal representation in the defense of Black and poor people, as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court, offers little protection to the person stuck with a bad lawyer.
IV. CRITICAL RACE ANALYSIS OF DEATH DETERMINATION
Even in death penalty cases in which the jury is comprised of more than a token Black representative (or none at all), the effects of the dominant white privileged way of thought can still be seen and felt. Due to the influence and pressures of the constant racism faced by Black people in society, many find it easier to “join them”, instead of try to beat them; meaning that they choose to attempt to mimic and align themselves with the ideology of white supremacy of the dominant majority. This is done in an effort to become more acceptable to, and possibly even find favor from, the white people whom they observe in most of the positions of power in our society. This phenomenon can be observed in the words and actions of many of the Black people who do manage to make it into the criminal justice process, whether it is the arresting officer, prosecuting attorney, public defender, judge, or even juror. In his essay, “Death in Whiteface”, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner refers to this as whiteface, which he defines as “…the purchase of an ideology or broad belief system grounded in the belief that nonwhite or “white trash” others are innately prone to irresponsibility and immorality.” (Ogletree and Sarat, 2006).
This falls right in line with the Critical Race Theorist view that objectivity in the criminal justice system, and legal system as a whole, is an illusion. ‘Objective’, as it applies here, actually means the values and beliefs of those who are born with the property of whiteness, and all the benefits and protections thereof. Given the ‘innate inferiority and immorality’ of Black people, it is the duty of those within the legal system to be the protectors of those with property (White, wealthy), from those without (Black, poor). This is the status quo, the standard point-of-view, from which all decisions within the legal system are made. Several polls of racial attitudes in recent years have shown that most white people do not consider racial discrimination the cause of Black inequality. If not racial discrimination, then what? The answer is painfully obvious, although it is usually never spoken by ‘intelligent’ white people, except possibly in coded language: They believe that the true reason for Black inequality is the natural, innate inferiority of Black people. Although manifested differently by Conservatives and Liberals, Northerners and Southerners, Democrats and Republicans, this is still the belief of the dominate white majority in this country. And since the laws and rules that govern this country are made by white people, for the preservation of white supremacy, it is clear to see why the death penalty continues to be applied in the manner that it is. If Blacks are considered naturally inferior, then by default that would imply the natural superiority, or supremacy, of white people, and ultimately the supremacy of white life over Black life. For anyone not a follower of the dominant white supremacist ideology (as a white person or Black person who accepts the ‘whiteface’), the methods utilized to justify and maintain white dominance range from laughable to psychopathic. For example, it is often used as an excuse to justify lynching, and even slavery, that the white men and women who participated in cruel and inhuman behavior were just ‘people of their time’, not animals, insane, or somehow lacking mentally. No, they were good, honest, loving, God-fearing people, who due to the time they grew up in, decided to burn Black people alive and shoot their already dead bodies; to rape Black women and keep their own children as slaves; to cut pregnant Black women’s stomachs open, pull the child out, and bash its skull; to hang and castrate Black men for the capital offense of looking at a white woman, all while having a picnic of sandwiches and fruit. They were lovely people. However, Black people, who for years were enslaved, had families torn apart, were denied education of any kind, suffered torture and murder at random, and even following the abolition of slavery, were and are hindered from equality and advancement by various tactics, lynched, and forced into crowded ghettos, are innately inferior?
Viewing the death penalty from the perspective of white supremacy, it is a well oiled machine that does exactly what it is intended to do: Not only allow, but promote the value of white life over Black life. Those Blacks in the criminal justice system, and those facing murder charges particularly, are the lowest of the low, as Derrick Bell referred to as “the faces at the bottom of the well.” In addition, they are viewed as the biggest threat to white supremacy, due to their unwillingness, or perceived inability, to accept the ‘whiteface’, and be assimilated into the white supremacist ideology. White supremacy in its present-day form has far less to do with skin color and far more to do with the mentality, the ideology, of the individual. A Black person, who is non-assimilated, and accused of murder, is a threat. But a Black person, who is non-assimilated, and is accused of the murder of a white person, is not only a threat, but must be killed, utilizing the well-oiled machine, and with all appearances of propriety. Despite what the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts throughout the United States have said, or chosen not to address, the evidence of discrimination and racism is apparent. According to the Baldus study, one of the most comprehensive studies done on disparities in the death penalty, in 96% of states where reviews of race and the death penalty have been done, there was a pattern of either race-of-defendant or race-of-victim discrimination, or both(Baldus report to the ABA, 1998). The statistical data speaks for itself, and is overwhelming. It is no surprise that the majority of white people support a legal system that serves and protects their interest, and severely punishes those mostly Black and poor individuals who do not accept or understand their ‘proper place’ in this white supremacist society. The question is why do a large number of Black people, who have suffered the most at the hands of the U.S. legal system, and have seen the way that it is used to promote and preserve white supremacy, still support it? As with most things, the death penalty cannot be looked at in a vacuum. It must be looked at in the context of history, and any analysis of it must include the connections the death penalty and legal system have with other areas of society.
What are often classified as conscious and unconscious racism both play prominent roles in the use of the death penalty among poor Black people. Conscious racism is most often viewed as the blatant words, ways, and actions that show hatred or disdain for a particular race, and a desire to keep people from that race subjugated. Examples of this would be use of ‘hate’ words such as nigger or monkey in reference to Black people; openly discriminatory practices based on race, such as exclusion of Black people from certain neighborhoods, jobs, or clubs, with that being expressed openly; acts of violence, or manipulation of the legal system to unfairly punish Black people, in which the role of race is not hidden, but openly expressed. Unconscious racism is considered to deal with the more deeply ingrained set of values, beliefs, and prejudices that shape the views of a person towards another person or group of people. These ingrained ideas are not manifested in clear and obvious racist action, but in more subtle ways that on the surface may appear race-neutral. Examples of this would be the use of peremptory strikes to remove virtually all Blacks from a jury, with various excuses given for this, none directly addressing the race of the potential juror. Another example would be the requirement of “exceptionally clear proof” to sustain a claim of racial discrimination in infliction of the death penalty under the Equal Protection Clause, which basically requires an unrealistic and ridiculous situation where a decision maker in the judicial process has to in some way openly say or show that they pursued the death penalty against a Black defendant based on race. Although individual Justices have acknowledge the impact that unconscious, or subtle racism, can play in the death penalty decision-making process, the Supreme Court, and other courts as a whole, have chosen to ignore the evidence showing disparities in death penalty application, and allowed the executions of Black people who at the very least raised reasonable doubt as to their innocence. Just as a single Black juror may be influenced by threats and harassment by 11 other white jurors, and cast a vote in favor of death even though they don’t feel it is warranted, others in the death penalty cycle are influenced by outside forces as well. Police chiefs, many of whom know that the death penalty is not a significant deterrent to crime, still may push for its use so as to appear that they are tough on crime. The same applies to prosecutors, who don’t want their usually white constituents to think that they are not interested in protected their property and more valuable lives.
V. CONCLUSION
There are really two basic schools of thought concerning the use of the death penalty and the obvious disparities that exist in its application: Those who think that the problem is fixable, through legislation and judicial reform, and those who think the problem is permanent, and cannot be fixed. Those who think that the problem is fixable propose a national moratorium for the death penalty, so that the problems of race that seem to be inherent in it can be addressed and dealt with. There is not much evidence or information as to how this temporary stoppage of the death penalty will differ from the one that took place in 1972, especially given that a majority of the problem is unconscious racism, or at the very least racism that will not be obvious or easily detected. I tend to support the other option, which is total abolition of the death penalty within the United States as it stands at present. The impact of racism is too prevalent and difficult to detect, especially given the legal standards of proof needed, the disparities too great, and the risk of taking more innocent lives too likely, to continue the process as it exists at present. The death penalty is irrevocable; once a person is dead, they’re dead, nothing can bring them back. Those who accept the fact that innocent people are executed, most of whom are Black and poor, are simply wearers of the same whiteface that produced the system in the first place. The death penalty should not be considered as a form of punishment until the long oppressed voices and viewpoints of Black people and other poor people are heard and considered of equal importance, if then.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Law Review Articles
1. Charles R. Lawrence III, The Id, The Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning With Unconscious Racism, 39 Stanford L. Rev. 317(1987).
2. Stephen B. Bright, Discrimination, Death, and Denial: The Tolerance of Discrimination in Infliction of the Death Penalty, 35 Santa Clara L. Rev.433 (1995).
3. Carlton Waterhouse, Avoiding Another Step In a Series of Unfortunate Legal Events: A Consideration of Black Life Under American Law from 1619 to 1972 and A Challenge to Prevailing Notions of Legally Based Reparations, 26 B.C. Third World L.J. 207 (2006).
4. Kimberle’ Williams Crenshaw, Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331 (1988).
5. Stephen B. Bright, Counsel For The Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer, 103 Yale L.J. 1835 (1994).
6. Susan Bandes, Simple Murder: A Comment on the Legality of Executing the Innocent, 44 Buff. L. Rev. 501(1996).
Books
1. Paul D. Carrington and Trina Jones, Law and Class in America (2006).
2. Ronald W. Walters, White Nationalism, Black Interests- Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community (2003).
3. David Cole, No Equal Justice (1999).
4. Silvana Siddali, From Property to Person (2005).
5. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (2006).
Websites
1. Amnesty International-http://web.amnesty.org/library.
2. Center on Wrongful Convictions- www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions.
3. The Innocence Project- www.innocenceproject.org.
The Exploitation of Women in hip hop culture
The Exploitation of Women in Hip-hop Culture
By Ayanna
Hip-hop is the latest expressive manifestation of the past and current experience as well as the collective consciousness of African-American and Latino-American youth. But more than any music of the past, it also expresses mainstream American ideas that have now been internalized and embedded into the psyches of American people of color over time.
A part of the learned mainstream American culture is sexism and misogyny. Hip-hop culture is frequently condemned for its misogynistic exploitation of women, but this misogyny has its roots in the culture in which we live. Hip-hop but can be explored and used as a valuable tool in examining gender relations. It brings to surface the issues that face many young people, such as discrimination, peer relations, and self-worth, that can be considered in order to bring about change in the misogynistic aspects of hip-hop culture and American culture, in general. For young people that do not hold sexist ideals, mainstream hip-hop may influence them to do so as it spreads and continuously gains popularity. And others are directly and indirectly supporting an environment that allows sexism to continue.
Exploitation of women in hip-hop culture has become an accepted part of it for both the artists and audiences alike, and many critics blame the music without looking any deeper. When going to any hip-hop related event, my friends and I normally expect that we will be disrespected verbally and physically, and have to prepare ourselves accordingly. We have to be careful in choosing what clothes to wear, how we carry ourselves and what we say. I have often wondered why it is so acceptable (for men and women) and what the roots of the values expressed in the culture are.
Hip-hop culture, started by black and Latino youth in New York City, (by definition) encompasses rapping (and now singing), deejaying, break-dancing, and graffiti-writing, but has evolved to be much more than that. It is now a lifestyle for many young people mostly between the ages of 13 and 30. It now involves music videos, fashion, language, the club scene, and the general way in which young people interact with one another. Hip-hop culture is widely used in commercials (Coca-Cola, Burger King), fashion advertisements, video games, TV shows, and there is even a hip-hop exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The most powerful and influential part of hip-hop culture has come to be rap music, a form of poetry that is said over musical instrumentation. In recent years rap music has developed a reputation of being brutally honest, violent, and misogynistic.
Much of the music and many videos specifically transmit, promote, and perpetuate negative images of black women. All women, but mostly black women in particular are seen in popular hip-hop culture as sex objects. Almost every hip-hop video that is regularly run today shows many dancing women (usually surrounding one or two men) wearing not much more than bikinis, with the cameras focusing on their body parts. These images are shown to go along with a lot of the explicit lyrics that commonly contain name calling to suggest that women are not worth anything more than money, if that. Women are described as being only good for sexual relations by rappers who describe their life as being that of a pimp. In many popular rap songs men glorify the life of pimps, refer to all women as they think a pimp would to a prostitute, and promote violence against women for 'disobeying.'
Of course, not all rap songs are misogynistic and all black men do not speak and think this way, but large percentages within hip-hop culture do. The name calling disrespects, dehumanizes, and dishonors women. If a man labels a woman with any of these names, he may feel justified in committing physical or psychological violence against her. The name-calling may also be representative of the way these men are thinking and feeling the anger, disdain, and ill feelings toward women. Joan Morgan, who refers to herself as a hip-hop feminist, reveals, "Yeah, sistas are hurt…But the real crime isn't the name-calling, it's their failure to love us---to be our brothers in the way that we commit ourselves to being their sistas."[1] Many black men within hip-hop culture who battle racism and oppression themselves everyday have been conditioned by society not to trust or love, and if they do not love themselves, it is difficult for them to love women or anyone else in a healthy manner.
Misogynistic hip-hop does not only expose black men's pain, but it also shows the issues that black women may want to deal with. Much of the sexual exploitation in hip-hop culture is done with the consent and collaboration of women. A significant amount of misogynistic hip-hop consumers are women, and hundreds of bikini-donned women show up for the music video shoots as unpaid participants.[2] Dance clubs and backstages of concerts are flooded with women who express willingness to do anything sexually with a man to get drinks, money, jewelry, or just to feel privileged and wanted.
Women, especially black women, have less access to power, material wealth, and protection and so have historically used sex (in prostitution and various other domains) as the "bartering chip" to gain access.[3] Misogynistic ideas and practices from the past have been passed down to today's hip-hop youth. For example, during slavery the black woman was often forced to have sexual relations with any male (slavemasters, overseers, and slaves) that desired her. Black women were sometimes used as breeding instruments to produce more human property, and at other times forced to have sex to pay the for food, the safety of her children, or to be treated less harshly on a day to day basis. They were "paying" with their bodies as a survival strategy.
Out of this emerged the stereotype of black women as promiscuous and oversexed, and this shaped some black women's sexual morality. Some started to look at themselves as society viewed them, and some accepted that they had no control over their own bodies. When trying to fit into white society after slavery and take on ascribed white gender roles. Some black men wanted black women to have a subordinate role in the home while some women wanted men to be the sole economic providers. They have been, for the most part, unable to meet each other's expectations, but these same obsessions are demonstrated in hip-hop culture. Some women want men to be the economic providers, and use their sexual power to receive economic gain from men. While some men within hip-hop want women to be passive and have learned to manipulate women by offering money and power to them.
In a study done about black male/female relationships of the hip-hop generation, many black men in the hip-hop culture that were interviewed valued economic resources and used these resources as a way to manipulate and control women. And some women negotiated with their bodies for things that they wanted.[4] In order to gain access to these things and to get the love and attention from men that they want, some women felt they must cater to the exploitative images of what men want and think women should be.
Many women defined their own worth on what they can do for and get from a man. Some women were willing to take risks with their bodies, minds and hearts hoping to raise their socio-economic status and gain security for their children's future, and they have learned to use their sexuality to do this. Vibe Magazine talked to four women in the September 2001 issue who all regularly had one-night stands or on-going sexual relationships with rappers. One of the women Vibe talked to is Nikki, a 30-year-old woman who has had many lovers in the hip-hop industry. Vibe said, "…her lovers read like a Who's Who of rap."[5] Her reason for partaking in multiple insignificant relationships with rappers was, "I've got nothing to offer…No education, no good job, no nothing. So why would a man want me, other than sex? I felt I had to give, so I used myself."[6] Many women like Nikki are put all of the blame on themselves for being used by men. They assumed and accepted that men would oppress and disrespect them. As another one of the women described, "If you had the right kind of man that wasn't controlling, and you were like a team, it'd be cool…But there's no man out there like that."[7] The four women described a new low in relationships between men and women within the hip-hop community. Men thought that women were only worth giving them sexual favors, and women thought men are only worth giving them money.
Censorship of hip-hop music is not the solution. Instead, the solution is to change the culture, system, and ideology so misogynist lyrics are not written. There are female hip-hop artists and consumers who are trying to fight against the hip-hop misogyny, but many times they are not taken seriously. Some female artists try to work within the current male-dominated industry and play the expected misogynist role. Others are seen as misusing sex and feminism and devaluing black men, or just "shootin' off at the mouth."[8]
Education is the first step in changing gender relations in the hip-hop community. People first need to be made aware that women's rights are being violated verbally in the sexist lyrics, in physical interactions at hip-hop events, and in the general way that hip-hop youth interact with one another everyday. Each individual can remember the roots of his/her own internalized sexist ideology. Knowing the history of this ideology, we can keep history from being repeated. A change in the hip-hop culture's collective consciousness can spread to the larger population, or vice versa. We need knowledge to act and speak out against the exploitation of women, not only in hip-hop culture, but in all cultures everywhere.
1. Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-hop Feminist. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. 74.
2. Morgan, Joan. 78
3. Morgan, Joan. 77
4. Hutchinson, Janis Faye. "The hip hop generation African American male-female relationships in nightclub settings." Journal of Black Studies. Sept. 1999. 73
5. Dobie, Kathy. "Love's Labor Lost." Vibe. Sept. 2001. 196.
6. Dobie, Kathy. 196.
7. Dobie, Kathy. 198.
8. Keyes, Cheryl. "Empowering self, making choices, creating spaces: Black female identity via rap music performance." Journal of American Folklore. Summer 2000. 77.
By Ayanna
Hip-hop is the latest expressive manifestation of the past and current experience as well as the collective consciousness of African-American and Latino-American youth. But more than any music of the past, it also expresses mainstream American ideas that have now been internalized and embedded into the psyches of American people of color over time.
A part of the learned mainstream American culture is sexism and misogyny. Hip-hop culture is frequently condemned for its misogynistic exploitation of women, but this misogyny has its roots in the culture in which we live. Hip-hop but can be explored and used as a valuable tool in examining gender relations. It brings to surface the issues that face many young people, such as discrimination, peer relations, and self-worth, that can be considered in order to bring about change in the misogynistic aspects of hip-hop culture and American culture, in general. For young people that do not hold sexist ideals, mainstream hip-hop may influence them to do so as it spreads and continuously gains popularity. And others are directly and indirectly supporting an environment that allows sexism to continue.
Exploitation of women in hip-hop culture has become an accepted part of it for both the artists and audiences alike, and many critics blame the music without looking any deeper. When going to any hip-hop related event, my friends and I normally expect that we will be disrespected verbally and physically, and have to prepare ourselves accordingly. We have to be careful in choosing what clothes to wear, how we carry ourselves and what we say. I have often wondered why it is so acceptable (for men and women) and what the roots of the values expressed in the culture are.
Hip-hop culture, started by black and Latino youth in New York City, (by definition) encompasses rapping (and now singing), deejaying, break-dancing, and graffiti-writing, but has evolved to be much more than that. It is now a lifestyle for many young people mostly between the ages of 13 and 30. It now involves music videos, fashion, language, the club scene, and the general way in which young people interact with one another. Hip-hop culture is widely used in commercials (Coca-Cola, Burger King), fashion advertisements, video games, TV shows, and there is even a hip-hop exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The most powerful and influential part of hip-hop culture has come to be rap music, a form of poetry that is said over musical instrumentation. In recent years rap music has developed a reputation of being brutally honest, violent, and misogynistic.
Much of the music and many videos specifically transmit, promote, and perpetuate negative images of black women. All women, but mostly black women in particular are seen in popular hip-hop culture as sex objects. Almost every hip-hop video that is regularly run today shows many dancing women (usually surrounding one or two men) wearing not much more than bikinis, with the cameras focusing on their body parts. These images are shown to go along with a lot of the explicit lyrics that commonly contain name calling to suggest that women are not worth anything more than money, if that. Women are described as being only good for sexual relations by rappers who describe their life as being that of a pimp. In many popular rap songs men glorify the life of pimps, refer to all women as they think a pimp would to a prostitute, and promote violence against women for 'disobeying.'
Of course, not all rap songs are misogynistic and all black men do not speak and think this way, but large percentages within hip-hop culture do. The name calling disrespects, dehumanizes, and dishonors women. If a man labels a woman with any of these names, he may feel justified in committing physical or psychological violence against her. The name-calling may also be representative of the way these men are thinking and feeling the anger, disdain, and ill feelings toward women. Joan Morgan, who refers to herself as a hip-hop feminist, reveals, "Yeah, sistas are hurt…But the real crime isn't the name-calling, it's their failure to love us---to be our brothers in the way that we commit ourselves to being their sistas."[1] Many black men within hip-hop culture who battle racism and oppression themselves everyday have been conditioned by society not to trust or love, and if they do not love themselves, it is difficult for them to love women or anyone else in a healthy manner.
Misogynistic hip-hop does not only expose black men's pain, but it also shows the issues that black women may want to deal with. Much of the sexual exploitation in hip-hop culture is done with the consent and collaboration of women. A significant amount of misogynistic hip-hop consumers are women, and hundreds of bikini-donned women show up for the music video shoots as unpaid participants.[2] Dance clubs and backstages of concerts are flooded with women who express willingness to do anything sexually with a man to get drinks, money, jewelry, or just to feel privileged and wanted.
Women, especially black women, have less access to power, material wealth, and protection and so have historically used sex (in prostitution and various other domains) as the "bartering chip" to gain access.[3] Misogynistic ideas and practices from the past have been passed down to today's hip-hop youth. For example, during slavery the black woman was often forced to have sexual relations with any male (slavemasters, overseers, and slaves) that desired her. Black women were sometimes used as breeding instruments to produce more human property, and at other times forced to have sex to pay the for food, the safety of her children, or to be treated less harshly on a day to day basis. They were "paying" with their bodies as a survival strategy.
Out of this emerged the stereotype of black women as promiscuous and oversexed, and this shaped some black women's sexual morality. Some started to look at themselves as society viewed them, and some accepted that they had no control over their own bodies. When trying to fit into white society after slavery and take on ascribed white gender roles. Some black men wanted black women to have a subordinate role in the home while some women wanted men to be the sole economic providers. They have been, for the most part, unable to meet each other's expectations, but these same obsessions are demonstrated in hip-hop culture. Some women want men to be the economic providers, and use their sexual power to receive economic gain from men. While some men within hip-hop want women to be passive and have learned to manipulate women by offering money and power to them.
In a study done about black male/female relationships of the hip-hop generation, many black men in the hip-hop culture that were interviewed valued economic resources and used these resources as a way to manipulate and control women. And some women negotiated with their bodies for things that they wanted.[4] In order to gain access to these things and to get the love and attention from men that they want, some women felt they must cater to the exploitative images of what men want and think women should be.
Many women defined their own worth on what they can do for and get from a man. Some women were willing to take risks with their bodies, minds and hearts hoping to raise their socio-economic status and gain security for their children's future, and they have learned to use their sexuality to do this. Vibe Magazine talked to four women in the September 2001 issue who all regularly had one-night stands or on-going sexual relationships with rappers. One of the women Vibe talked to is Nikki, a 30-year-old woman who has had many lovers in the hip-hop industry. Vibe said, "…her lovers read like a Who's Who of rap."[5] Her reason for partaking in multiple insignificant relationships with rappers was, "I've got nothing to offer…No education, no good job, no nothing. So why would a man want me, other than sex? I felt I had to give, so I used myself."[6] Many women like Nikki are put all of the blame on themselves for being used by men. They assumed and accepted that men would oppress and disrespect them. As another one of the women described, "If you had the right kind of man that wasn't controlling, and you were like a team, it'd be cool…But there's no man out there like that."[7] The four women described a new low in relationships between men and women within the hip-hop community. Men thought that women were only worth giving them sexual favors, and women thought men are only worth giving them money.
Censorship of hip-hop music is not the solution. Instead, the solution is to change the culture, system, and ideology so misogynist lyrics are not written. There are female hip-hop artists and consumers who are trying to fight against the hip-hop misogyny, but many times they are not taken seriously. Some female artists try to work within the current male-dominated industry and play the expected misogynist role. Others are seen as misusing sex and feminism and devaluing black men, or just "shootin' off at the mouth."[8]
Education is the first step in changing gender relations in the hip-hop community. People first need to be made aware that women's rights are being violated verbally in the sexist lyrics, in physical interactions at hip-hop events, and in the general way that hip-hop youth interact with one another everyday. Each individual can remember the roots of his/her own internalized sexist ideology. Knowing the history of this ideology, we can keep history from being repeated. A change in the hip-hop culture's collective consciousness can spread to the larger population, or vice versa. We need knowledge to act and speak out against the exploitation of women, not only in hip-hop culture, but in all cultures everywhere.
1. Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-hop Feminist. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. 74.
2. Morgan, Joan. 78
3. Morgan, Joan. 77
4. Hutchinson, Janis Faye. "The hip hop generation African American male-female relationships in nightclub settings." Journal of Black Studies. Sept. 1999. 73
5. Dobie, Kathy. "Love's Labor Lost." Vibe. Sept. 2001. 196.
6. Dobie, Kathy. 196.
7. Dobie, Kathy. 198.
8. Keyes, Cheryl. "Empowering self, making choices, creating spaces: Black female identity via rap music performance." Journal of American Folklore. Summer 2000. 77.
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