Against the Current, No. 86, May/June 2000

NEW YORK CITY and Los Angeles have become the model for life under capitalism in general, and in late-twentieth century urban America in particular.  For the affluent are the booming stock and real estate markets; for the poor, a vista of injustice piled on injustice, atrocity on atrocity, serial police murder with impunity.  After Amadou Diallo, Malcolm Ferguson; then Patrick Dorismond: If you are Black in New York you can be shot dead if you stand still, run away, or refuse an offer to sell drugs to undercover cops.

I RECENTLY RECEIVED two surveys in the mail. The first came from the U.S. Census Bureau, asking me a number of personal questions-some relevant, others intrusive.

For the first time, however, the census offered me more options than the "normal" white, Black, Hispanic and other categories for race. I could now identify myself by checking as many ethnic groups as I liked.  Progress?  Maybe.

MARCH 22, 2000 -- As this article is written the movement to win justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal is gearing up to mobilize for his first day in Federal District Court.

The date, unknown at this point, is crucial and could well determine the future of Mumia's appeal for a new trial. The key issue, of course, is the lack of elementary due process during both the original trial and Mumia's appeals through the Pennsylvania state courts.

NOW THAT PUBLIC outrage slowly diminishes regarding the Amadou Diallo case, this essay shares some of the immediate feeling and reaction that occurred at the time of the verdict. Furthermore, this essay tries to imagine salient possibilities for re-education in policing methods within communities of color.

"Justice is incidental to law and order." --J. Edgar Hoover

IT'S LATE AFTERNOON -- a rain dreary Friday afternoon -- just after 5:00 pm. The verdict is in -- NOT GUILTY. I am numb, but in truth not surprised. The television blares incessantly....

When it became clear early on the evening of March 7 that California's Juvenile Crime Initiative (Proposition 21) had passed by a wide majority, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of San Francisco, converging outside the Mission district police station.  Earlier that day, more than 500 protesters shut down San Francisco's Hilton hotel, protesting at the hotel's support of the Initiative.

Just a few days before Christmas, the Chicago Tribune ran an article under the whimsical title, "Another Can of Worms for CHA." (CT 12/23/99) This report described how, in its rush to force a group of recalcitrant residents to move from one poorly maintained building in the Robert Taylor Homes public housing complex to another before the holidays, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) had cut off power to the building.

"It's almost ten years after the wilding in Central Park, and what people had stigmatized as a black criminal mentality they now have to look at in Colorado and Arkansas. When white youths display the rage of what they'd panned off as black pathology, they now have to look at it as an American pathology<197>as a country diseased at its core when children step out to kill. They're literally using their lives as revenge against the culture. And I don't think that we can ignore that and keep saying it's an individual pathology or it's because of the family. The country creates the family. People, for the most part, don't create their own values; the culture gives values -- that's the purpose of culture." --Sapphire(1)

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. . ."
- Frederick Douglass, 1857

These words aptly describe recent events at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  At 2:00 PM. on Wednesday, February 16, 2000, seven students walked into UW-Madison Chancellor David Ward's office in Bascom Hall. The students-Brendan O'Sullivan, Molly McGrath, Mark Brakken, Sarah Turner, Riza Falk and Adam Klaus, chairperson of the Associated Students of Madison-demanded that the university change its sweatshop practices.

One of James Hoffa's first initiatives after assuming the office of Teamsters General President was-no giggling please-to announce that he was launching a "self-policing" anti-corruption effort called Project RISE (Respect, Integrity, Strength, Ethics).  A few months later, to lend his effort sorely needed anti-corruption credentials, Junior Hoffa hired former U.S. prosecutor Ed Steir and ex-FBI official James Kossler to front for Project RISE as "advisors."

The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 by Mark Solomon (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1998) 403 pages, $17 paperback.

Old Negro, New Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars by William J. Maxwell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 254 pages, $17.50 paperback.

Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46 by Bill V. Mullen (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999) 242 pages, $16.95 paperback.

The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 by James Edward Smethurst (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 288 pages, $45 hardcover.