Selective Outrage- Mumia Abu-Jamal

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?