Saturday, December
06, 2014 This is not the way it is supposed to be;
When we elected a black president, we thought the killing
would stop, or that black people would have an ally in the government they
could call on when things got tough on a local level – the way our flawed
memory made it look back in the day when Kennedy was president or LBJ.
It was never as good as we remember it, and just the same as
it is now, black president or white, the black man on the street still walks with
a target on his back – and behind the gun that shoots him is a whole parade of
public officials thick with excuses as to why it happened and how they will do
their best to keep it from happening again, embarrassed liberal mayors who
promise justice and deliver bullshit, conservative congressman who screech
about law and order after they have spent decades degrading the system so that
poor people – most of them of color – must feel ashamed to want public
assistance, or even get what they deserve from government, because the rich
whites do not want to have to share the wealth they have made off the backs of
poor, underpaid working class or more nefariously feeding the drug machine they
thought would help quell the riots that broke out a generation ago.
We get tea party jerks telling us how much urban schools
cost, and how much people in the suburbs have to pay in taxes after white
people fled the cities in order not to have to live side by side with people of
color, or share the wealth that whites made in the aftermath of a war that was
designed to save the world from fascism.
Taxes rose because whites decided to build white-only
enclaves elsewhere, building new roads, new schools, and new shopping districts
(then called malls) that would keep them from having to improve the places they
abandoned.
But they always ached to come back, to retake the cities,
and so invented laws that locked black men away at a rate that only the Nazis
might envy and we supposedly fought a world war to stop, building prisons so that
the streets might be “clean again,” and safe again for whites to feel
comfortable in.
The police, of course, were always the barrier between the
races, regardless of what color the faces were wearing the uniform, much like
the British soldiers that occupied this or that country – they always had house
slaves they could trust to betray their own, to help become part of the shock
troops that kept the rest of the slaves in line, while white men still served
as overseers.
But jails became too expensive, too, and our society to its
credit (if you dare call it that) was just not willing to go as far as the
Nazis did in creating a final solution. This said, a man in a jail cell could
die from AIDS because jail guards would not protect him from being raped, or from
a host of other less notorious illnesses because providing healthcare to
inmates was not society’s first priority.
But people of color simply didn’t die off fast enough and so
we return them to the street, jobless, dreamless, no more ready for the world
than when they went in, and often with families starving because whites did no
more to make the cities better than when they fled in the first place.
Gentrification has become the new means of social control,
constructing living spaces people in these cities can’t afford, narrowing the
landscape of the ghettos in much the way Nazis did in the precursor to sending
them to the camps, so that like rats people of color had to living in smaller
and squalid spaces while watching white prosperous people build new enclaves
inside the cities, and day by day watching their own existence deteriorate.
Now, it is not distance that keeps rich from poor, or patrol
cars guarded gated communities in other parts of the state, but shock troops of
cops prowling the border between neighborhoods, like an occupying army, their
duty to serve and protect.
You can’t blame cops. They are the of the stick held by the
hand of a system of justice never designed to live up to its name, Justice, but
to guard wealth and protect a way of life which does not include people of
color.
Of course, we all bought into the fallacy that if we elected
black leaders and we got friends in government that somehow those leaders would
change the culture and stop inevitable social cleansing this generation’s
gentrification actually is.
But the, what we get is a black president arming white
police with military weapons, and we know it can’t be for the benefit of those
being shot down with the ordinary kind.
We have seen this before. Jewish activists say the pattern
is always the same: you strip people of their rights, isolate them, and kill
them. Fascism, by whatever means, whether a gas chamber or city zoning, always
operates the same way, and always comes to the same conclusion, someone lying
dead in the streets.
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