I encourage everyone to look at how the White majority riots in response to perceived or actual racial injustice. The OJ verdict gives us our most vivid example. The White majority of the US riots politically and economically when they feel slighted, or that the Black minority is simply getting too uppity.
O.J. was accused of murdering his wife and her friend on June 1994, by the mid-term elections of that same year, White had totally flipped the political tone of the nation with the ‘Republican Revolution’ that brought Newt Gingrich to the fore. The Republicans had been out of power for the last 40+ years, and the White majority has swept them, and their racist agenda into power in one fell swoop! The White majority knew that the Republican Party was the party of the elite, and not the workers, but they were willing to sacrifice their own working class because they also knew that the Republicans were intent on repelling all of the gains given by Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the 1957 civil rights bill. They elected the Republicans to put Blacks back in their political, economic, and cultural place.
In that same year the White majority made The Bell Curve a New York Times bestseller, and essentially re-birthed the pseudosciences of Black genetic inferiority, and the concept of a genetic marker for crimes and violence. These ideas were whispered in corporate board rooms, the Ivory Towers of academia, and in White Think Tanks, they give fuel to the ongoing drive for Mandatory minimum sentencing and Black mass incarceration.
Then came the Welfare reform, or what’s formally know as the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. This was passed by President Bill Clinton with the urging and support of Newt and his Republican Revolutionaries. It cast millions of more Black children into deeper poverty with the signing of a pen.
I am only touching the surface here, but I just want to show you how those in power deal riot and rebel, how they use their power to sanction and punish Black peoplw when we get out of hand. Now, I know that much of what the White majority did eventually came back to bite them in the ass, but what else is new?
We need understand that we can make great changes in our communities, and in this society without one march, protest, or short-term boycott. We can use the political, economic, and cultural institutions as tools or even weapons if we get informed and organized.
I plan on working smart as well as hard for justice and long-term liberation. I invite you to join me.
Forward.
History is a Weapon to those who know how to wield it.
