It has all to do with the definition of what it means to be a man. Because an oppressor recognizes that it is far more likely that it is the male of the species whose going to resist domination - Dr Amos Wilson
"Just think," de Volney declared incredulously, "that this race of Black men, today our slave and the object of our scorn, is the very race to which we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech! Just imagine, finally, that it is in the midst of people who call themselves the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that one has approved the most barbarous slavery, and questioned whether Black men have the same kind of intelligence as whites! "In other words the ancient Egyptians were true Negroes of the same stock as all the autochthonous peoples of Africa and from the datum one sees how their race, after some centuries of mixing with the blood of Romans and Greeks, must have lost the full blackness of its original color but retained the impress of its original mould."
The birth and development of the American police can be traced to a multitude of historical, legal and political-economic conditions. The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing. Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation's first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.
This video disturbs me. I now present to you, a look behind the curtains of this 1984 world.
It shows how statistics are commonly mis-construed to hide the true nature of the prison industrial complex.
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues persuasively we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control. ---More African Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850--- Alexander reviews American racist history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its deliberate transformation into the war on drugs. She provides analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice. She spoke at Riverside Church in Manhattan May 21, 2011. Camera: Joe Friendly
Michelle Alexander is a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator. She won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and subsequently directed the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. Alexander is a former law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, and has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, DemocracyNow! and NPR. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is her first book. Audio: Riverside Church, Camera: Joe Friendly
And here is a shorter interview:
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues persuasively we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control. ---More African Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850--- Alexander reviews American racist history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its deliberate transformation into the war on drugs. She provides analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice. She spoke at Riverside Church in Manhattan May 21, 2011. Camera: Joe Friendly
There are more African Americans under correctional control today - in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began." - Michelle Alexander
