Why the
Feds Punk Out When Confronting White Rightwing
Insurgents
When a criminal justice system born in Native
American genocide and Black slave patrolling finds
itself in conflict with conservative white Christian
landowners, it short-circuits.
By Glen Ford
January 09, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
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"BAR
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The armed right-wing activists that
seized control of a federal wildlife sanctuary
compound in eastern Oregon have already committed –
and conspired to commit – enough serious criminal
violations of U.S. law to land each of them in
federal prison for the rest of lives. Of course, as
Wajahat Ali points out in The Guardian
newspaper, if the gunmen were Muslim or Black,
they’d
already be dead.
This is not a
great revelation. Every Black child knows that white
lives carry a premium value in the United States,
while Blacks are casually killable. In a society
where Walking While Black, Driving While Black or
simply Breathing While Black is so often treated as
a capital crime, the racial double standard is the
norm. That’s why it’s insane to think that this
society can be made worthy of Black habitation
through tinkering with the system, piecemeal
reforms, and appeals to the federal government for
protection and relief. This is the same federal
government that framed poor Black men from Miami and
Newburgh, New York, on terrorist conspiracy charges,
and that condones conspiracy indictments carrying
life in prison for 100 Black youngsters from New
York City housing projects based on their postings
in
Facebook. But the white, rightwing land grabbers
who are in armed occupation of federal property
can’t seem to buy a confrontation with
President Obama’s FBI or any other armed federal
agency. How is it, the people of the world must be
wondering, that a country that runs by far the
world’s biggest prison system, with the most heavily
armed cops on the planet, equipped with the most
advanced evidence gathering devices known to man –
how is it that the Superpower of Policing and
Prosecution seems to fear a confrontation with
groups with names like the Oregon Bearded Bastards?
The reason is really quite simple: the
U.S. criminal justice system was not
created to control white militias or
greedy ranchers or gun-toting racists
and Bible-thumpers. For most of U.S.
history, these were prime stakeholders
in the American project to build a White
Man’s Nation. The gunmen in Oregon have
plenty of historical reasons to believe
that land-grabbing is their birthright –
and that a significant segment of white
America empathizes with them. The
federal government treads lightly,
because white Christian lives do matter.
For almost 50 years, the primary mission
of the U.S. criminal justice system has
been to control, contain and incarcerate
Black Americans. It has spent half a
century refining the tools to terrorize
Black people on the streets, in their
homes and in their schools. It is so
efficient at what it does, that one out
of every eight prison inmates on the
planet is an African American. The Mass
Black Incarceration State was designed
to pre-empt any insurgency by Black
people – not to deal with the Bundy
family and the Bearded Bastards of
Oregon.
That’s why I think the Lords of Capital
are much more afraid of Donald Trump
than they are of Bernie Sanders. They
think Trump might stir up more of those
white bearded bastards, many of whom
hate Wall Street almost as much as they
do the federal government – which is a
real problem for U.S. law enforcement.
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