History We Didn’t Learn In Public School. The Greatest Conspiracy:  “How Did White Supremacy Survive The Civil War?” 
us-ed-and-the-new-jim-crow.com

Posted by Chauncey DeVega

According to conservatives, the news media has a “liberal  bias”: this is a foundational tenet of the Right-wings propaganda and disinformation campaign against the American people.

Black youth are running amok in mass and attacking white people across the country in a bacchanal of violence known as “the knockout  game”.  But, if  there is a “liberal media”, why is the knockout game story being circulated by  such “liberal” news outlets like MSNBC, CNN, The NY Times, USA Today, and others? Why would the liberal media legitimate the knockout game narrative instead of suppressing or covering it  up?

The “liberal media” is a myth and a lie. There is no liberal media; there is only a corporate media. The knockout game is a moral panic wherein isolated incidents of random street crime are reframed as a nationwide plague upon innocent and vulnerable white people by deviant and naturally criminal blacks.

The sensational allure of the knockout game is drawn from the same racial and cultural imagination as D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist film Birth of a Nation. The cultural trope of the black brute, rapist, and thug, are as central to American memory as is George Washington, apple pie, and the myth of rugged individualism and American exceptionalism.

Consequently, the allure of the knockout game for white conservatives and the Right-wing media (in an era where racism and conservatism are one in the same) is irresistible and instinctive. The supposedly “liberal media” is influenced by similar forces.

Research in media studies, sociology, communications, and political science has repeatedly demonstrated that this supposedly “liberal” news media exaggerates and misrepresents the amount of crime in American society, emphasizes crimes committed by blacks against white people, underplays and does not report crimes committed by whites against black people (and or other white people), and actively reproduces white racist narratives that link African-Americans with crime and criminality.

Ultimately, the moral panic about the knockout game has little to do with crime and public safety. The knockout game meme is a byproduct of a white cultural obsession with black criminals, and a reflection of a political environment where insecurity about changing racial demographics, and the election of the United States’ first black president, have combined to create cognitive and emotional upset for a good number of white Americans. These racial fears, resentments, and anxieties are catered to and nourished by a Right-wing media that birthed and rapaciously disseminated the knockout game narrative.

It is important to note that crime is at record lows in the United States. Most crime is intraracial. A person is more likely to be victimized by someone they know and who looks like them than by a stranger.

Perhaps, the appeal of the knockout game narrative lies in its randomness? Maybe the knockout game is especially pernicious and salacious in that regard? If that is the case, there are many other crimes in the United States that should be given at least the same amount of attention by the news media as has been received by the knockout game.

There is no equivalent moral panic about the mass shootings committed by white men, in which dozens, if not hundreds of people, have been killed and injured. Likewise, there is no mass hysteria about the record growth in the number of white hate groups and militias with the expressed intent of overthrowing the United States government and of waging a war on people of color.

The moral panic, by design, exaggerates isolated incidents into a plague and epidemic that is a threat to all “good” people in “normal” society.

Applying that logic beyond the knockout game, why is there not a moral panic about white female teachers who have been repeatedly caught having sex with their underage students? There is an epidemic of drug use by white folks. Yet, there is no moral panic.

There have been unconscionable crimes committed by white young people against blacks–such as the case in Joliet, Illinois where four white teenagers killed two African-American men, dismembered the bodies, and then had sex on top of the corpses.

Blacks and other people of color are disproportionately the victims of white hate crimes, but there is relative silence by the mass media about that fact. White men are over represented among serial killers. They are also more likely to be child rapists, consume child pornography, commit treason, and participate in domestic terrorism. White men in the finance and banking industries committed criminal acts which destroyed the United States’ and worlds’ economies.

Again, there is no moral panic. White leaders are not called upon to denounce the criminals and thugs in their communities; by contrast, the demand by white folks, conservatives in particular, that black people apologize and “take responsibility” for “black crime”, is a ritual of American civic and public life.

There is no discussion of “white crime” in the United States news media.

When white people commit crimes, they are not represented as a collective reflection of white people. White privilege demands that the ill deeds of white people are framed as individual acts that reveal nothing about white people in mass. Black people are almost uniquely identified with crime, and thus subjected to group stigma because of it.

The link between black people and criminality in American society is so mnipresent that it has been the basis of political campaigns (see the infamous Willie Horton ad and the Republican Party’s decades-long Southern Strategy) and influences racial attitudes on a subconscious level as measured by implicit bias tests, and public opinion as revealed by the impact of symbolic racism on white Americans’ political values and beliefs.

Ironically, the knockout game is more proof that there is no “liberal media”. A liberal media would not–with those few exceptions of responsible reporting that exposed the knockout game epidemic as a moral panic and lie–circulate a narrative born from white supremacist websites, and other fringe, even by contemporary conservatism’s low standards, sources such as WorldNetDaily and the American Thinker.

The phrase “if it bleeds it leads” has been used to describe how the news media frames its stories and coverage. I would suggest that the above language should be modified in the following way: “if it bleeds it leads, especially if the ‘victims’ are white and the ‘perpetrators’ are black”. The “liberal media” and its Right-wing equivalent both abide by this mantra.

The moral panic around black young people and the knockout game is an object lesson in how the “liberal” and “conservative” media may be more alike than different when it comes to their shared obsession with “black crime”.

He Says It Happens Every Day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIlSqk_pfbA

Bronx resident Kalief Browder was walking home from a party when he was abruptly arrested by New York City police officers on May 14,

2010. A complete stranger said Browder had robbed him a few weeks earlier and, consequently, changed the 16-year-old’s life forever.

Browder was imprisoned for three years before the charges were dropped in June 2013, according to a WABC-TV Eyewitness News investigation.

At the time of the teen’s arrest, Browder’s family was unable to pay the $10,000 bail. He was placed in the infamously violent Rikers Island correctional facility, where he remained until earlier this year.

Now that he’s free, the young man is speaking up about his experience.

“I spent three New Year’s in there, three birthdays…,” Browder, now 20, said in a recent interview with WABC, adding that he was eleased with “no apology.”

In October, Browder filed a civil lawsuit against the Bronx District Attorney, City of New York, the New York City Police Department, the New York City Department of Corrections and a number of state-employed individuals.

The official complaint states Browder was “physically assaulted and eaten” by officers and other inmates during his time at Rikers Island. The document also maintains the accused was “placed in solitary confinement for more than 400 days” and was “deprived meals.” In addition, officers allegedly prevented him from pursuing his education. Browder attempted suicide at least six times.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Browder’s current lawyer Paul Prestia summarized his client’s experience as “inexplicable” and “unheard of.” Based off one man’s identification, Browder was charged with robbery in the second degree, he notes. It took three ears to dismiss these charges, even though it was, in Prestia’s words, a “straightforward case to try.”

“The city needs to be held accountable for what happened,” Prestia said. “[Browder] had a right to a fair and speedy trial, and he wasn’t afforded any of that. He maintained his innocence the entire time, and essentially got a three year sentence for that.”

Still, when Browder was offered a plea deal in January, he refused to take it, because he did not want to plead guilty to the crime, WABC-TV notes. (Had Browder been tried in a timely fashion and pled guilty to the crime, Prestia told HuffPost, he might have spent less time ehind bars.)

Prestia adds that his client has suffered lingering mental health problems, and though he’s currently going to school for his GED, he’s “clearly way behind from where he would have been.”

“We need someone to be held accountable,” Prestia said. “This can’t just go unnoticed. To the extent that [Browder] can be financially compensated — although it’s not going to get those years back for him — it may give him a chance to succeed.”

The District Attorney’s office said it was unable to comment, as Browder’s allegations are currently the subject of ongoing litigation.

Incidentally, Browder’s claims about his experience at Rikers Island are consistent with findings from a recent report commissioned by the New York City Board of Correction. The report, obtained by The Associated Press, notes that the use of force by staff has more than tripled from 2004 to 2013, from seven incidents of force per 100 inmates, to almost 25. Additionally, the number of self-mutilation and suicide attempts by Rikers inmates have increased by 75 percent from 2007 to 2012. According to the report, 40 percent of the city jail’s 12,200 inmates are mentally ill, and many of these inmates are placed in solitary confinement “holes” as punishment.

“It’s Intimidating. And It’s Free.”

And It’s Coming Soon to the Local

Ghetto Occupation Army

AP exclusive finds 165 MRAP vehicles used in Iraq handed to local police departments (731 more requested).  Sarah Lazare | November 26, 2013

Warren County Under-sheriff Shawn Labouree stands next to the department’s new mine resistance ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP in Queensbury, New York (Photo: Mike Groll / Associated Press)

Weapons of occupation are coming to cities and towns across the United States after the Department of Defense handed 165 military fighting vehicles formerly used in Iraq to local law enforcement as part of a military surplus program.

 This transfer of military weaponry, reported in an Associated Press exclusive on Monday, will send mine resistant ambush protected vehicles, or MRAPs—which weigh 18 tons each and include gun turrets and bulletproof glass—to urban and rural areas, some of which don’t even have the physical infrastructure to support such heavy and large vehicles.

 These are not the first armored military vehicles given to U.S. police departments. A little-known 1033 program, originating from the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997, allows the Department of Defense to donate what it considers surplus military equipment to police and sheriff departments, Michael Shank and Elizabeth Beavers wrote in The Guardian. A total of $4.2 billion in such equipment, including tanks and grenade launchers, has been donated so far.

 Albany County, New York Sheriff Craig Apple said of the MRAP vehicle his department will be receiving, “It’s armored. It’s heavy. It’s intimidating. And it’s free,” the Associated Press reports.

 These giveaways, which have expanded in recent years, are on top of $34 billion in Homeland Security-backed federal grants given to local police departments since September 11th, 2001 to fight “terrorism.”

 This is in addition to growing business between law enforcement, private defense contractors, and arms manufacturers that has facilitated the influx of military-grade weapons and vehicles—including drones—onto U.S. streets. Private sector and law enforcement collaboration is exemplified in annual weapons expos and SWAT team training Urban Shield, previously reported in Common Dreams.

 Critics blast the MRAP giveaway as evidence of the heightening militarization of the police.

 “The militarization of U.S. law enforcement is but an extension of the expanding police state,” said Lara Kiswani of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in an interview with Common Dreams. ”The U.S. not only exports and imports military equipment and weapons, but it also exchanges strategies and tactics of repression that have seeped deep into our communities.”

 “From the gross devastation that the people in Iraq have suffered as a result of US wars and occupation, to oppressive torture tactics and violent military attacks of the apartheid state of Israel, to the growing militarization of communities in the U.S., the policies and interests are one in the same,” she added. “They are all a means of social, political and economic control at the expense of the poor, working class, immigrants, youth, and black and brown communities.”

 This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.

The first Jim Crow was a system of laws and practices begun as soon as the Civil War ended.  It was built on the two infamies, as Frederick Douglass characterized them, of the convict leasing system and the lynch law.  Its purpose was 1) to replace the cheap labor provided by 4 million African Americans liberated in the Civil War and upon which the economy of the slavocracy was wholly dependent, 2) to deny the freedman the vote and any protection of law, and 3) to preserve the ideology of white supremacy which the defeated South required as the rationale for the total subjugation of African-Americans.

With the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865 which prohibited involuntary servitude except as punishment for crimes, the defeated slave states immediately began passing the so-called “black codes” of 1865 and 1866.  The center piece of these black codes was the criminalization of “vagrancy”, which was defined as failing to be contracted to work for a white man. These laws provided huge supplies of convict labor that was leased to plantations, farms, logging camps, railroads and mines and provided a major source of revenue to the states and to the local sheriffs, deputies, judges and clerks who received fees for every arrest and conviction.  This apparatus provided great financial incentive to produce an ever-larger supply of convict labor to rebuild the South and spur its development into the modern industrial economy.

The almost limitless, renewable supply of convict labor had a distinct advantage over slave labor in that it was cheaper.  Slaves were the property of the slave owner, representing a capital investment, and as such had to be maintained, fed, clothed, and housed, in order to protect the slave owner’s investment.  But convict labor represented no such capital investment.  In fact the corporations leasing convicts had no incentive to maintain them.  The corporations actually had a financial incentive to provide the bare minimum of necessities needed to maintain the convicts in working condition over the short term. The less provided the convict laborers, the greater the profit of the corporations.  A mortality rate of 10% per month was not unheard of in the corporate convict labor camps.  And the supply of fresh African-American convict laborers was always available under Jim Crow.

Jim Crow existed over the 100 year period from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the passage of the voting rights act in 1965.  There was a brief 10 year period, beginning in 1868 with the passage of the 14th and 15th  Civil Rights Amendments, during which  Federal troops were sent into the states of the former confederacy to enforce these Amendments.  Free schools were established, African –Americans voted, owned property, and were elected to office.  This period, Radical Reconstruction, lasted until 1877 when all Federal troops were withdrawn from the South in a political deal that gave a contested Presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes and gave the former slave states back to the white supremacist rulers and the Ku Klux Klan, which enforced Jim Crow law with naked terror for the next 90 years.

Most important in the maintenance of this system was the denial of the right to vote to African –Americans.  States limited the franchise to men whose grandfathers had voted, thus excluding freedmen who grandfathers were slaves.  States required African-Americans to pass literacy tests which asked such questions as “Can you name the 67 county clerks of this state?” or “How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?”  States, not exclusively Southern, charged a poll tax.  Louisiana charge blacks one dollar to vote in 1917, equivalent to 18 dollars today.  And of course, the Klan or its threat was ever present, parked outside the voting booth in a pickup with a rifle mounted over the back window and a large confederate flag waving atop the antenna.  At the time the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, only 7% of Southern blacks voted.

The ultimate terror of the Klan, the White Citizens Councils, and similar groups with their white supremacist sympathizers was the extra-judicial executions of the lynch law.

Lynchings occurred to persuade freed labor to return to the plantations or eliminate black landholders whose land was then seized; they were carried out as reprisals for alleged rape which enhanced the status of the Klan as defenders of the virtue of white Christian womanhood and propagated the myth of the bestial black male; and from 1865 on through 1965 they were used to destroy every attempt to bring civil rights to the South.  The first massive campaign against implementation of the 13th, 14th and 15th civil rights Amendments was headed up by the Klan in 1868 and resulted in the death of 1300 of the Amendments’ supporters.  More than 2 dozen mass lynchings were reported well into the 20th century.

An estimated 4700 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, 3400 blacks and 1700 whites.  Many of the whites were immigrants or advocates of civil rights.  Lynchings were often held during the day in a festival like atmosphere.  Men, women and children as young as 10 years old were hanged, mutilated, tortured and sometimes set on fire. White families with young children attended the spectacle.  Smiling men had their photographs taken next to the smoldering corpses. Body parts were taken as souvenirs.

New Jim Crow to follow.

Private Prisons Demand States Fill Their Empty Beds