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Re: What blacks should be protesting: Detroit high students revolt against staff
Basically, from what I read, this is the gist of it. First, the Civil Rights movement and War on Poverty were a case of corporations and elitists giving money to the moderate leaders and sects they approved of in order to ensure that those people were kept in power. Basically, what the author is saying, is that some movement leaders sold out for money. Its funny that people are always accused of selling out when they take money when without the money they would never make it to begin with. Also, why would anyone want to give money to a radical? Lets use the best example in this case. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King. One was a radical Islamist who preached hatred and the other was a Christian minister who preached peace. Who do you think "elitists" (in other words people with money) and corporations would want to give money to? Who would you give money to? I know Malcolm X wouldn't have gotten a dime of my money because he hated me to begin with. At least MLK made it known that he just wanted equal rights, not special ones. Second, I love the way the author portrays the War on Drugs as some kind of race hunting spree that targeted blacks. Sorry bud, but you don't roll through white suburbia and see white kids on the corner dealing drugs. You see that in the black inner city. That's just facts. In addition, and this is my favorite part, is the way he portrays it as black people just minding their own business, you know, just selling some heroin and BOOM! Johnny Law comes around the corner and makes a victim of him. How dare the law enforcement officers actually ENFORCE the law instead of turning a blind eye. This guy is actually implying that its not the black drug dealers fault that he got caught BREAKING THE LAW but the cops fault for ENFORCING THE LAW. You can't make this stuff up. The fact of the matter is this. Cops don't go looking for drugs where there are no drugs. I'm not saying white people don't use drugs. They certainly do. But like I said, you don't roll through white suburbia and see drugs being dealt. You see that in black inner cities. Just like in the country. You don't see cops looking through nice, two story houses for meth labs. You see them looking through run down trailers that have tin foil over the windows. Imagine if cops came around frisking middle class families, of any color, while they were talking a walk down their nice sidewalk in Anytown, USA. We'd be up in arms. Headlines would read "Off target cops frisk mom of 3 while on walk". We would wonder what our law enforement was doing harrassing obviously innocent people. But, that's what the author insinuates should happen. We should either A) Target all citizens as possible drug dealers, pimps, and thieves or B) Just let the aforementioned criminals have at it because we don't want to seem racist. Again, you can't make this stuff up.
OK. Here are excerpts from the article:
The Ford Foundation also sponsored the Grey Areas program in the early 1960s, which evolved into President Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” as a program for “urban renewal,” but was, in fact, concerned with issues arising out of poor people’s (and particularly poor people of colour’s) resistance to major urban growth projects undertaken by a coalition of corporations and corporatist labour unions following World War II. As Roger Friedland wrote:
Political challenge by the poor, and especially the nonwhite poor, threatened the dominance of the corporations and labor unions and the growth policies they pursued. It was the poorest neighborhoods which were displaced by urban renewal and highway construction, whose housing stock was depleted by clearance, whose employment opportunities were often reduced both by the expansion of office employment stimulated by central business district growth and by restrictive unionization on large construction projects and municipal jobs, and whose services were constrained by the enormous fiscal costs of the growth programs.[38]
It was in this context that the Ford Foundation established programs aimed at ameliorating the antagonisms within the impoverished communities, not through structural or systemic change of the causes of poverty, but through organization, institutionalization, and legalistic reform programs, thus leading to the government’s “War on Poverty.” The same approach was taken in regards to the Civil Rights movement.
The major foundations “supported the moderate civil rights organizations in response to the ‘radical flank’ threat of the militants, while non-elites (churches, unions and small individual donors) spread their support evenly.”[40]
Elite patronage of the Civil Rights movement “diverted leaders from indigenous organizing and exacerbated inter-organizational rivalries, thereby promoting movement decay.”[41] Foundation funding for civil rights did not become significant until 1961-62, five years after the Birmingham bus boycott, and the peak of foundation support for civil rights was in 1972-73, four to five years after the assassination of King.[42] This indicated that foundation grants to civil rights were ‘reactive’, in that they were designed in response to changes in the movement itself, implying that foundation patronage was aimed at social control. [...] Many of the foundations subsequently became “centrally involved in the formulation of national social policy and responded to elite concerns about the riots.”[44]
For clarification purposes, I am mentioning slavery in a historical context for in order for us to effectively aid the black community, we must first understand why the black community is the way it is today, which would require a historical look of black people over time in terms of politics, economics, and culture.
In terms of the War on Drugs:
As reported in the journal, Punishment & Society:
The impact of these developments has fallen disproportionately on young African-Americans and Latinos. By 1994, one of every three black males between the ages of 18-34 was under some form of correctional supervision, and the number of Hispanic prisoners has more than quintupled since 1980. These developments are not primarily the consequence of rising crime rates, but rather the ‘get-tough’ policies of the wars on crime and drugs.[60]
[...]
Just as took place during the criminalization of black life following the Civil War, the criminalization of black life following the Civil Rights Movement saw not only the growth of incarceration rates for the black community, but also saw the growth of the use of the prison population as a source of cheap labour. In today’s context, with privatization of prisons, outsourcing of prison labour, and other forms of exploitation of the “punished” population, this has given rise to what is often referred to as the “prison-industrial complex.”[63]
I'm trying to understand. I really am. I'm having a really hard time, though.
Basically, from what I read, this is the gist of it. First, the Civil Rights movement and War on Poverty were a case of corporations and elitists giving money to the moderate leaders and sects they approved of in order to ensure that those people were kept in power. Basically, what the author is saying, is that some movement leaders sold out for money. Its funny that people are always accused of selling out when they take money when without the money they would never make it to begin with. Also, why would anyone want to give money to a radical? Lets use the best example in this case. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King. One was a radical Islamist who preached hatred and the other was a Christian minister who preached peace. Who do you think "elitists" (in other words people with money) and corporations would want to give money to? Who would you give money to? I know Malcolm X wouldn't have gotten a dime of my money because he hated me to begin with. At least MLK made it known that he just wanted equal rights, not special ones. Second, I love the way the author portrays the War on Drugs as some kind of race hunting spree that targeted blacks. Sorry bud, but you don't roll through white suburbia and see white kids on the corner dealing drugs. You see that in the black inner city. That's just facts. In addition, and this is my favorite part, is the way he portrays it as black people just minding their own business, you know, just selling some heroin and BOOM! Johnny Law comes around the corner and makes a victim of him. How dare the law enforcement officers actually ENFORCE the law instead of turning a blind eye. This guy is actually implying that its not the black drug dealers fault that he got caught BREAKING THE LAW but the cops fault for ENFORCING THE LAW. You can't make this stuff up. The fact of the matter is this. Cops don't go looking for drugs where there are no drugs. I'm not saying white people don't use drugs. They certainly do. But like I said, you don't roll through white suburbia and see drugs being dealt. You see that in black inner cities. Just like in the country. You don't see cops looking through nice, two story houses for meth labs. You see them looking through run down trailers that have tin foil over the windows. Imagine if cops came around frisking middle class families, of any color, while they were talking a walk down their nice sidewalk in Anytown, USA. We'd be up in arms. Headlines would read "Off target cops frisk mom of 3 while on walk". We would wonder what our law enforement was doing harrassing obviously innocent people. But, that's what the author insinuates should happen. We should either A) Target all citizens as possible drug dealers, pimps, and thieves or B) Just let the aforementioned criminals have at it because we don't want to seem racist. Again, you can't make this stuff up.