Why do some news media twist stories of violence to reframe them as stories of cultural or racial difference, in an attempt to imply inferiority or superiority?
The issue with grooming gangs that target vulnerable children and then exploit them is not a racial issue.
It is clearly a behavioural and cultural issue, in the sense that this behaviour occurs in every hierarchically violent culture, irrespective of race, religion, skin tone, language group or gender.
The only place you will not find this behaviour is in egalitarian cultures.
Two mass murderers, two human beings, two skin tones, two cultures and two utterly different approaches towards how they are placed. Similar events that happen within the same culture are treated differently.
This is just one example of the way the issue of race and perceived difference is handled by some news media and by some politicians - it sets people within the different communities against each other., rather than opposed to the violence itself. The violence becomes a secondary issue.
Racists and Xenophobes delight in this kind of caricature. Those who would prefer that different communities do not find solidarity with one another appreciate the advantage such a twisted and slanted caricature provides.
The issue here is clearly not skin tone, culture or demographic - the issue is the violence - and yet there are those will who co-opt the narratives of the violence to make indirect claims about race and culture that are aimed at audiences who will be influenced to internalise those claims, and that will feed the expression of petty hatreds, which in turn fuels more dismal street level abuse adding to the existing sense of oppression and all of this perpetuates social division, it breaks down bridges of solidarity between ordinary folk, and it is being used as political distraction in the public domain.
Why is this form of Racism so common?
Where did this come from?
Who benefits from this skewed portrayal?
Political Grooming: inventing Race as a social weapon.
Racist ideology was invented in the Americas, while they were still British Colonies, under British Rule, paying taxes to the British State. Race was defined by Christians, using the Bible as the source of their reasoning, and instituted into Laws defining the White Race.
Race was invented as a carefully crafted novel social phenomenon, and rather than emerging as some natural outpouring, it was enabled via pulpit, pamphlet and deliberate legislative action that favoured different low class labouring groups, one over the other - white free workers above white indentured workers, who stood over black indentured workers, all of whom were favoured over slaves who had been freed, with slaves and Native peoples placed at the bottom of the new hierarchy, and this was carried out during the 1640's - 1690's, a four decade program.
Slavery was already a substantial dynamic across the Spanish Empire colonies in South America.
Yet in early Colonial years it was rare, as the indentured worker was the dominant mode of labour.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p262.html
There were some Africans who were brought to the 'New World' who ended up as indentured labour.
In most cases they were people who had been taken as slaves from Africa by the Spanish or by the Portuguese, and who were then captured as booty by English pirates, who were at war with the Catholic Spaniards and their allies.
The pirates, seeking to monetise their booty then brought them to the 'New World' where they were sold into indentured work - they would work a number of years to pay for their purchase costs, and on completion, would be granted status as a free person, and could work, save money, buy land, farm it, build businesses, marry and contribute to the social development of the colonies and so forth. There were slaves as well, and in the early years a fair number were freed by their owners or were able to buy their freedom. The bulk of the labour force was European, largely British and Irish.
As the colonies expanded, the need for labour grew too. Indentured labour was harsh, and had a high attrition rate. Many who started died while they were still indentured. With expansion, there was a need for more labourers.
In time slavery was introduced, then institutionalised and industrialised: turned into a fully fledged commercial operation, and industry, supplying slave labour to the colonies, to meet that need.
This led to a situation where in terms of numbers, the population of workers, indentured, freed and enslaved ran to many times that of the wealthy, the troops that defended the colonies, the urban middle class and their loyal workers. The work was hard, the lifestyle harsh, the social environment oppressive.. There was a huge disparity between the power of the wealthy and the power of the working poor. The labour force lived lives that were pretty much a state of punitive oppression.
The owners started to make laws to control this larger population, bit by bit.
"The shift from indentured servitude to racial slavery in the British colonies is evident in the development of the colonies' laws.
• Virginia, 1639: The first law to exclude "Negroes" from normal protections by the government was enacted.
This is just one example of the way the issue of race and perceived difference is handled by some news media and by some politicians - it sets people within the different communities against each other., rather than opposed to the violence itself. The violence becomes a secondary issue.
Racists and Xenophobes delight in this kind of caricature. Those who would prefer that different communities do not find solidarity with one another appreciate the advantage such a twisted and slanted caricature provides.
The issue here is clearly not skin tone, culture or demographic - the issue is the violence - and yet there are those will who co-opt the narratives of the violence to make indirect claims about race and culture that are aimed at audiences who will be influenced to internalise those claims, and that will feed the expression of petty hatreds, which in turn fuels more dismal street level abuse adding to the existing sense of oppression and all of this perpetuates social division, it breaks down bridges of solidarity between ordinary folk, and it is being used as political distraction in the public domain.
Why is this form of Racism so common?
Where did this come from?
Who benefits from this skewed portrayal?
Political Grooming: inventing Race as a social weapon.
Racist ideology was invented in the Americas, while they were still British Colonies, under British Rule, paying taxes to the British State. Race was defined by Christians, using the Bible as the source of their reasoning, and instituted into Laws defining the White Race.
Race was invented as a carefully crafted novel social phenomenon, and rather than emerging as some natural outpouring, it was enabled via pulpit, pamphlet and deliberate legislative action that favoured different low class labouring groups, one over the other - white free workers above white indentured workers, who stood over black indentured workers, all of whom were favoured over slaves who had been freed, with slaves and Native peoples placed at the bottom of the new hierarchy, and this was carried out during the 1640's - 1690's, a four decade program.
Slavery was already a substantial dynamic across the Spanish Empire colonies in South America.
Yet in early Colonial years it was rare, as the indentured worker was the dominant mode of labour.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p262.html
There were some Africans who were brought to the 'New World' who ended up as indentured labour.
In most cases they were people who had been taken as slaves from Africa by the Spanish or by the Portuguese, and who were then captured as booty by English pirates, who were at war with the Catholic Spaniards and their allies.
The pirates, seeking to monetise their booty then brought them to the 'New World' where they were sold into indentured work - they would work a number of years to pay for their purchase costs, and on completion, would be granted status as a free person, and could work, save money, buy land, farm it, build businesses, marry and contribute to the social development of the colonies and so forth. There were slaves as well, and in the early years a fair number were freed by their owners or were able to buy their freedom. The bulk of the labour force was European, largely British and Irish.
As the colonies expanded, the need for labour grew too. Indentured labour was harsh, and had a high attrition rate. Many who started died while they were still indentured. With expansion, there was a need for more labourers.
This led to a situation where in terms of numbers, the population of workers, indentured, freed and enslaved ran to many times that of the wealthy, the troops that defended the colonies, the urban middle class and their loyal workers. The work was hard, the lifestyle harsh, the social environment oppressive.. There was a huge disparity between the power of the wealthy and the power of the working poor. The labour force lived lives that were pretty much a state of punitive oppression.
The owners started to make laws to control this larger population, bit by bit.
"The shift from indentured servitude to racial slavery in the British colonies is evident in the development of the colonies' laws.
• Virginia, 1639: The first law to exclude "Negroes" from normal protections by the government was enacted.
Virginia, 1639 Act X. All persons except Negroes are to be provided with arms and ammunition or be fined at the pleasure of the governor and council.
• Maryland, 1664: The first colonial "anti-amalgamation" law is enacted (amalgamation referred to "race-mixing"). Other colonies soon followed Maryland's example. A 1691 Virginia law declared that any white man or woman who married a "Negro, mulatto, or Indian" would be banished from the colony forever.Maryland, 1664 :That whatsoever free-born [English] woman shall intermarry with any slave. . . shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issue of such free-born women, so married shall be slaves as their fathers were.
• Virginia, 1667: Christian baptisms would no longer affect the bondage of blacks or Indians, preventing enslaved workers from improving their legal status by changing their religion.
Virginia, 1667 Act III. Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children that are slaves by birth. . . should by virtue of their baptism be made free, it is enacted that baptism does not alter the condition to the person as to his bondage or freedom; masters freed from this doubt may more carefully propagate Christianity by permitting slaves to be admitted to that sacrament.
• Virginia, 1682: A law establishing the racial distinction between servants and slaves was enacted."Virginia, 1682 : Act I. It is enacted that all servants. . . which [sic] shall be imported into this country either by sea or by land, whether Negroes, Moors [Muslim North Africans], mulattoes or Indians who and whose parentage and native countries are not Christian at the time of their first purchase by some Christian. . . and all Indians, which shall be sold by our neighboring Indians, or any other trafficking with us for slaves, are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.
source : https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h315.html
The rulers/owners turned to the Churches they sponsored to use the Biblical story of The Tribe of Ham to suggest Africans were descendent from Ham, a son of Noah. The Africans were cast as a lessor race of people in this biblical hierarchy. And so the concept of racial hierarchy was initiated. Prior to that people thought of difference as just that, difference. The concept of innate biological or racial superiority was unknown. It was most often religious or political difference that mattered - Christianity vs Islam and Christianity vs Judaism for example, and class.
https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(son_of_Noah)
https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(son_of_Noah)
The land owners of the colonies used the Bible and it's Protestant Puritan Work Ethic interpretations to suggest that Africans could be therefore converted to Christianity, as they were part of the Judeo-Christian narrative, and in that way they could be 'saved', even within Slavery. Slavery was thus considered more akin to 'work' than imprisonment or punishment, and the idea of working diligently aligned with the Protestant work ethic which was central to the ideology of the colonial Europeans, and that made it easier to pretend that conversion to Christianity and diligence in the work they did could function as a way of saving the Africans from the eternal damnation of Hell, offered as a way to improve their lives and condition.
Native peoples, who were more often than not seen as robust, intelligent and in general honest peoples, in the early years, albeit different in nature and culture, were re-cast as Wild Savage Heathens, and thus they were already damned to Hell and being so savage and wild, they would not be easily converted to Puritan Christianity, and being indolent - they could not be easily enslaved, or put to work. They could be killed and their lands taken and turned to Christian expansion. That was the point - for the owners saw a potential Empire stretching out to the West.
In this way the Puritan Economy was laid out - Wealth reveals Gods favour, poverty was God's disfavour and thus poverty was seen as the fault of the poor, who could, if they but tried hard enough, win God's favour by working hard for the wealthy. If they did well, it was God's will.
The American Dream, work hard and God will reward you.
Thus a Christian Puritan Work Ethic Meritocracy social hierarchy was institutionalised, that ran from the owners who were Rich White Protestants, to Middle class white, artisan class white, menial labour white, white indentured workers,white criminals, black folk. native peoples.
A Hierarchy ordained by God.
The American Dream, work hard and God will reward you.
Thus a Christian Puritan Work Ethic Meritocracy social hierarchy was institutionalised, that ran from the owners who were Rich White Protestants, to Middle class white, artisan class white, menial labour white, white indentured workers,white criminals, black folk. native peoples.
A Hierarchy ordained by God.
The plantation owners established this in order to ensure that none of the oppressed would seek solidarity with each other and resist or rebel against the elite ruling class.
The invention of Race was a Political, Economic and Religious protocol for oppression and social division.
It was in effect the operation of a Political Grooming Gang.
Exploiting studied vulnerabilities within different segments of an oppressed population, triggering the emotion with suitably crafted content, exploiting the reactions, creating legalised favouritism that deliberately set one group against another.
The invention of Race was a Political, Economic and Religious protocol for oppression and social division.
It was in effect the operation of a Political Grooming Gang.
Exploiting studied vulnerabilities within different segments of an oppressed population, triggering the emotion with suitably crafted content, exploiting the reactions, creating legalised favouritism that deliberately set one group against another.
Political grooming gangs still operate across almost all power systems. Education that does not teach an honest history is in effect a political grooming operation, if only by omission, in some cases..
Such omissions are essential component of manufacturing consent, within Hierarchies of Violence, Power and Wealth.
Education is absolutely key to eradicating Racism across the grass roots.
So that's a little bit of the history on the origins of Racism,.
What about the realities of what is happening in the year 2020?
We need to understand how situations come to be, in order to confront what is not working, what is dysfunctional.
The Industrial Revolution could not have taken place in England as it did, without the wealth of the colonies, for which the slave trade was absolutely central. That is something we all need to understand. It might have happened in much smaller scale were it not for the vast wealth imported on the broken backs of slave and indentured labour - cheap labour generates profits. Same old, same old.
When slavery was abolished, the American south ensured that the 13th amendment contained a loop hole. Slavery was permitted within the prison system, for convicts.
American Police Brutality.
American policing has a world wide reputation for political corruption and racial violence as well as being portrayed as 'America's Finest' and held up as pillars of the community.
Growing up in the 60s and 70s, in Ireland, images of American police with billy clubs assaulting black civil rights marchers were known, we venerated Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movements.
And yet movies and TV series portrayed the police as decent warriors fighting crime in a hyper violent culture. Good guys, for the most part. A few bad apples.
The 80s saw the War Against Drugs unleash new levels of organised criminal violence, and new levels of police violence in response, even as the drugs industry expanded.
Policing took a different turn after 9/11 and became much more militarised as a result of The War Against Terror.
But there's a history to all of this we in Ireland and elsewhere knew little of.
George Floyd
As I edit this, on June 6th, there are protests across the Earth, large public events in many countries, in the midst of a global pandemic, in response to the awful murder of a black man, George Floyd, by 5 Minneapolis Police Officers. The grisly murder scene was recorded on various mobile phones, and the murder ran for just under 9 minutes.
The murder was recorded on smart phones and then broadcast on-line, which drew out much shock, anger and direct criticism. Well of course it did.
There were protests that day, protests which were largely peaceful, focused, and multi-racial. Local community was outraged and actively seeking immediate action.
The video footage was unequivocal - the police officers had total control of the arrested man, and they killed him, even as witnesses pleaded with the lead officer to take his knee off the mans neck..
People wanted justice, and the exercised their rights, and the people protested.
Justice was not forthcoming. Tensions flared.
In some places the protests erupted into riots, over a matter of days, in part because the murderers were not arrested and charged - they were fired, and that was obviously not just, and that inspired anger and outrage and in part because some people - not Black Lives Matter activists, others - wanted to escalate the situation.
Just as the media images at the top of this article, there are those who seek to co-opt intense situations for perceived political 'gain'. Agent provocateurs doing their bit. Once that flame is lit, it takes action to quench it.
After a week of night time riots in some cities, and many more peaceful, large scale daytime multi racial protests in others, the lead police officer was arrested,detained and charged with 3rd degree murder. Around the USA young people were talking to their elders about this situation, and many, many white people were being educated on the realities of racist police brutality. The protests continued. Trump made matters worse, by being divisive as ever, braying to his supporting base about being the President of Law and Order, and threatening Militarised Violent against rioters.
Videos of police brutality were flooding social media in ways people have not seen before. There was lots of police brutality before, for example looking back to the Occupy movement, that was not so well recorded and placed online. This time, the videos were reaching a much wider audience.
The charges were upgraded. And they were extended. The lead officer is now being charged with 2nd degree murder, and the other officers with 2nd degree murder.
Has something shifted? Too early to say. The learning is on going.
I would imagine the youth are not going to let this go.
Race, Policing and history.
Here's an interesting historical insight - the institutional set up of policing with regards to black communities in the North is rooted in assumptions made during the mass migration of black people from the South up into the North during the early years of the 1900s.
The 13th Amendment contained a slavery loophole, exploited across the Southern States.
Policy towards the incoming and expanding black community and how they were to be policed by largely white administrations flowed from assumptions based on data from the South, statistics taken at face value, without digging into the context and background of those statistics. Statistics can be lethal if taken without the correct context.
Khalil Muhammad is an American historian:
"..Muhammad’s work focuses on systemic racism and criminal justice; The Condemnation of Blackness deals with the idea of black criminality, which he defines as the process by which “people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not.”
That process has been a vicious cycle in American history, Muhammad explains, wherein black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, then deemed dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further."
It's from a Vox article, by Anna North, speaking with Khalil Muhammad, an American Historian.
How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian
“The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad says.
"The deliberate choice to abolish slavery, [except as] punishment for crime, leaves a gigantic loophole that the South attempts to leverage in the earliest days of freedom. What that amounts to is that all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights were then subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminals. And the only thing that wasn’t criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land.
Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South builds up a pretty robust carceral machinery and begins to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this. And for the next 70 years, the system is pretty much a criminal justice system that runs alongside a political economy that is thoroughly racist and white supremacist. And so we don’t get the era of mass incarceration in the South, what we get is the era of mass criminalization. Because the point is not to put people in prison, the point is to keep them working in a subordinate way, so that they can be exploited."
In the early years after 1900, a migration of black people from the rural South to the urban North started, and this accelerated during WWI and WWII, and afterwards, due to the war economy.
Historians differentiate between a first Great Migration (1916–40), which saw about 1.6 million people move from mostly rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940–70), which began after the Great Depression and brought at least 5 million black people including many townspeople with urban skills to the North and West.
So there's this influx of people, and an enlargement of the population, and an administration unfamiliar with the new comers. North and South really were two quite different cultures.
The South had exploited the loophole in the 13th Amendment, which permitted Slavery within prisons, to maintain control of the black population as a work force subservient to the white bosses, by using the threat of imprisonment as a whip, by criminalising a range of behaviours common to the black population. In effect they criminalised all sorts of normal behaviour of black people, and so their criminal records taken at face value portrayed the black community as more criminal than they were. And you can understand why so many decided to leave that toxic situation and move northwards.
The basics of this story is that the Northerner Police forces looked around for information, for any data, and the fell upon statistics from official records in the South, to try to plan for this new population dynamic, and in picking up raw data from the South without understanding it's context, the historical threads, they misread it and absorbed a series of incorrect assumptions that led to an institutionalised negative view of black communities from a policing perspective. This led to suspicion, it led to a prejudiced view of black communities, it repeated without analysis the bias of the South, it fostered racist attitudes and it led to much harsher policing tactics applied to the new black communities as a new standard.
And that standard persists to this day, in large part because it has, over time and through not being addressed, become institutionalised, embedded, part of the policing culture.
American Police forces have a profound problem and it is to do with their sense of entitlement to apply lethal violence, and their corrupt politicisation, which is mixed-up with racist perceptions, elitist political and economic policies, and both strands of this fabric of American life must be addressed, not least by the white majority working and middle class communities who elect politicians, sheriffs and district attorneys, and who fund the policing that continues in such fashion.
It is well worth reading the whole article, and looking further at Khalil Muhammad's book on this.
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
The present is always a thread of the past, and if we do not know how that weave was woven, we can be lost for words when we are trying to understand what we are seeing, and we can be conned or misguided into accepting easy assumptions that knowingly gloss over our lack of knowledge, if we are not careful.
The 13th Amendment
The 13th Amendment contained a loophole that allowed slavery to continue. The Southern States exploited that loophole to maintain control over the black work force. In order to do so, they maintained the lies of innate superiority of white people, and innate criminality of black people. This documentary digs into that historical dynamic and it's impacts today.
Such omissions are essential component of manufacturing consent, within Hierarchies of Violence, Power and Wealth.
Education is absolutely key to eradicating Racism across the grass roots.
So that's a little bit of the history on the origins of Racism,.
What about the realities of what is happening in the year 2020?
We need to understand how situations come to be, in order to confront what is not working, what is dysfunctional.
The Industrial Revolution could not have taken place in England as it did, without the wealth of the colonies, for which the slave trade was absolutely central. That is something we all need to understand. It might have happened in much smaller scale were it not for the vast wealth imported on the broken backs of slave and indentured labour - cheap labour generates profits. Same old, same old.
When slavery was abolished, the American south ensured that the 13th amendment contained a loop hole. Slavery was permitted within the prison system, for convicts.
American Police Brutality.
American policing has a world wide reputation for political corruption and racial violence as well as being portrayed as 'America's Finest' and held up as pillars of the community.
Growing up in the 60s and 70s, in Ireland, images of American police with billy clubs assaulting black civil rights marchers were known, we venerated Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movements.
And yet movies and TV series portrayed the police as decent warriors fighting crime in a hyper violent culture. Good guys, for the most part. A few bad apples.
The 80s saw the War Against Drugs unleash new levels of organised criminal violence, and new levels of police violence in response, even as the drugs industry expanded.
Policing took a different turn after 9/11 and became much more militarised as a result of The War Against Terror.
But there's a history to all of this we in Ireland and elsewhere knew little of.
George Floyd
As I edit this, on June 6th, there are protests across the Earth, large public events in many countries, in the midst of a global pandemic, in response to the awful murder of a black man, George Floyd, by 5 Minneapolis Police Officers. The grisly murder scene was recorded on various mobile phones, and the murder ran for just under 9 minutes.
The murder was recorded on smart phones and then broadcast on-line, which drew out much shock, anger and direct criticism. Well of course it did.
There were protests that day, protests which were largely peaceful, focused, and multi-racial. Local community was outraged and actively seeking immediate action.
The video footage was unequivocal - the police officers had total control of the arrested man, and they killed him, even as witnesses pleaded with the lead officer to take his knee off the mans neck..
People wanted justice, and the exercised their rights, and the people protested.
Justice was not forthcoming. Tensions flared.
In some places the protests erupted into riots, over a matter of days, in part because the murderers were not arrested and charged - they were fired, and that was obviously not just, and that inspired anger and outrage and in part because some people - not Black Lives Matter activists, others - wanted to escalate the situation.
Just as the media images at the top of this article, there are those who seek to co-opt intense situations for perceived political 'gain'. Agent provocateurs doing their bit. Once that flame is lit, it takes action to quench it.
After a week of night time riots in some cities, and many more peaceful, large scale daytime multi racial protests in others, the lead police officer was arrested,detained and charged with 3rd degree murder. Around the USA young people were talking to their elders about this situation, and many, many white people were being educated on the realities of racist police brutality. The protests continued. Trump made matters worse, by being divisive as ever, braying to his supporting base about being the President of Law and Order, and threatening Militarised Violent against rioters.
Videos of police brutality were flooding social media in ways people have not seen before. There was lots of police brutality before, for example looking back to the Occupy movement, that was not so well recorded and placed online. This time, the videos were reaching a much wider audience.
The charges were upgraded. And they were extended. The lead officer is now being charged with 2nd degree murder, and the other officers with 2nd degree murder.
Has something shifted? Too early to say. The learning is on going.
I would imagine the youth are not going to let this go.
Race, Policing and history.
Here's an interesting historical insight - the institutional set up of policing with regards to black communities in the North is rooted in assumptions made during the mass migration of black people from the South up into the North during the early years of the 1900s.
The 13th Amendment contained a slavery loophole, exploited across the Southern States.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation
Policy towards the incoming and expanding black community and how they were to be policed by largely white administrations flowed from assumptions based on data from the South, statistics taken at face value, without digging into the context and background of those statistics. Statistics can be lethal if taken without the correct context.
Khalil Muhammad is an American historian:
"..Muhammad’s work focuses on systemic racism and criminal justice; The Condemnation of Blackness deals with the idea of black criminality, which he defines as the process by which “people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not.”
That process has been a vicious cycle in American history, Muhammad explains, wherein black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, then deemed dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further."
It's from a Vox article, by Anna North, speaking with Khalil Muhammad, an American Historian.
How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian
“The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad says.
"The deliberate choice to abolish slavery, [except as] punishment for crime, leaves a gigantic loophole that the South attempts to leverage in the earliest days of freedom. What that amounts to is that all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights were then subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminals. And the only thing that wasn’t criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land.
Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South builds up a pretty robust carceral machinery and begins to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this. And for the next 70 years, the system is pretty much a criminal justice system that runs alongside a political economy that is thoroughly racist and white supremacist. And so we don’t get the era of mass incarceration in the South, what we get is the era of mass criminalization. Because the point is not to put people in prison, the point is to keep them working in a subordinate way, so that they can be exploited."
In the early years after 1900, a migration of black people from the rural South to the urban North started, and this accelerated during WWI and WWII, and afterwards, due to the war economy.
Historians differentiate between a first Great Migration (1916–40), which saw about 1.6 million people move from mostly rural areas in the South to northern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940–70), which began after the Great Depression and brought at least 5 million black people including many townspeople with urban skills to the North and West.
So there's this influx of people, and an enlargement of the population, and an administration unfamiliar with the new comers. North and South really were two quite different cultures.
The South had exploited the loophole in the 13th Amendment, which permitted Slavery within prisons, to maintain control of the black population as a work force subservient to the white bosses, by using the threat of imprisonment as a whip, by criminalising a range of behaviours common to the black population. In effect they criminalised all sorts of normal behaviour of black people, and so their criminal records taken at face value portrayed the black community as more criminal than they were. And you can understand why so many decided to leave that toxic situation and move northwards.
The basics of this story is that the Northerner Police forces looked around for information, for any data, and the fell upon statistics from official records in the South, to try to plan for this new population dynamic, and in picking up raw data from the South without understanding it's context, the historical threads, they misread it and absorbed a series of incorrect assumptions that led to an institutionalised negative view of black communities from a policing perspective. This led to suspicion, it led to a prejudiced view of black communities, it repeated without analysis the bias of the South, it fostered racist attitudes and it led to much harsher policing tactics applied to the new black communities as a new standard.
And that standard persists to this day, in large part because it has, over time and through not being addressed, become institutionalised, embedded, part of the policing culture.
American Police forces have a profound problem and it is to do with their sense of entitlement to apply lethal violence, and their corrupt politicisation, which is mixed-up with racist perceptions, elitist political and economic policies, and both strands of this fabric of American life must be addressed, not least by the white majority working and middle class communities who elect politicians, sheriffs and district attorneys, and who fund the policing that continues in such fashion.
It is well worth reading the whole article, and looking further at Khalil Muhammad's book on this.
The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
The present is always a thread of the past, and if we do not know how that weave was woven, we can be lost for words when we are trying to understand what we are seeing, and we can be conned or misguided into accepting easy assumptions that knowingly gloss over our lack of knowledge, if we are not careful.
The 13th Amendment
The 13th Amendment contained a loophole that allowed slavery to continue. The Southern States exploited that loophole to maintain control over the black work force. In order to do so, they maintained the lies of innate superiority of white people, and innate criminality of black people. This documentary digs into that historical dynamic and it's impacts today.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.
