By Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, James “Baridi” Williamson, Yusuf Bey IV, and Ivan Kilgore

“Slavery has been fruitful in giving itself names. It
has been called ‘the Peculiar Institution’, ‘the
Social System’, and ‘the Impediment’… It has
been called by a great many names, and it
will call itself by yet another name,
and you and I and all of us had
better wait and see what new
form this old snake will
come forth next….”

—Frederick Douglass

May 9, 1855

Have you ever read or heard about a click of rogue California correctional officers dubbed the “Green Wall?” What about the Oakland Police Department’s “Riders?” Or the “Rampart Division” of tine LAPD? How about those “Gladiator Fights” orchestrated by prison officials at the California State Prison, Corcoran, which resulted in 31 prisoners killed by police bullets? Certainly, you heard about the white police officer in OKC who was recently sentenced to 266 years for raping black women? Or the 21 or better officers at the LA County jail who were recently sentenced to federal prison? And who could forget Rodney King or what racist pigs did with fire hoses during the 1960s? It wasn’t that long ago.

Then there are the countless suspicious suicides and prisoner assassinations that have been rumored to have been setup by prison and jailhouse officials. And to think, for most of white America, this is simply a figment of the imagination. Yet it is a reality visited upon someone in this country every day! Sandra Bland and Hugo “Yogi Bear” Pinell experienced it! Michael Brown experienced it too! So too Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Tapir Rice, and sadly, countless others to come.

That said, it’s imperative that we do not attempt, with Black Lives Matter, to separate police terrorism on either side of the fence. For the streets ain’t the only place law enforcement needs body cameras! Even more, it’s imperative that we do not attempt a discourse on police terrorism without connecting it to judicial terrorism or judicial terrorism to penal, legislative or economic terrorism. For they are all of the same organism; a pathogen: capitalism, which strictly adheres to an age-old philosophy that deems the punishment justifiable (i.e., the incarceration, brutalization and, if necessary, the murder) of the innocent so as to maintain the “order” (i.e., the socio-economic and political arrangement) which fostered white supremacy.

Needless to say, it is a philosophy that gave way to a culture of racism, lawlessness, and terrorism that very much remains at the heart of law enforcement in America to this day. And like most of that which came of Europe to the Americas, it was derived from the most corrupt, narcissistic, and lustful thoughts of its revered scholars: Hobbes (1533-1679), Locke (1632-1704), Montesquieu (1689-1755), Rousseau (1712-73), Blackstone (1723-80), Beccaria (1738-1794), and others who, during the so-called Enlightenment era, rationalized, for lack of a better term, that Native Americans and Afrikans were but simple creatures of vice, and prone to acts of savagery—chattel, who lacked the moral capacity to determine what was just or cruel. In essence, the theory also applied to women, poor whites, and the diseased of Europe, and thus became the basis for colonial ideology.

This philosophy, this ideology of colonial imperialism, was recorded during the course of history as it spread throughout the Americas like a wild grass fire. Consequently, the Native bloodline and culture would suffer near extermination. Countless Creole and Latino ethnic groups bore the rape that came out of it. From Afrika to Europe, across the Caribbean Sea to the shores of the antebellum South, it would spread ivory Afrikan bones across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the Old South, it would form the “Peculiar Institution” Frederick Douglass foresaw as the “old snake” shed its skin and took shape in the nation’s system of criminal justice. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would give it vigor, proclaiming slavery the appropriate punishment for crime. And so, it was written, with this legislative enactment, the “philosophy” became the foundation upon which a racist system of government policies and laws would spring forth to form the image of who and what would be criminalized. The purported “Founders” of “AmeriKKKa” had indeed studied their scholars well.
Rousseau had instructed the law was but “an invention of the strong to chain and rule the weak.” And Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws provided them justification to enslave Afrikans:

…Since the peoples of Europe have exterminated those of America, they have had to enslave those of Africa in order to use them to clear and cultivate such a vast expanse of land.
Sugar would be too expensive if it weren’t harvested by slaves.
Those in question are black from the tip of their toes to the top of their heads; and their noses so flattened that it is almost impossible to feel sorry for them.
It is inconceivable that God, who is a very wise being, could have placed a soul, especially a good soul, in an all-black body….[Read More Here]

The above essay is an excerpt from the below book:

NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON!
NEW BOOK: My Comrades’ Thoughts On Black Lives Matter is an anthology of writings collected from people imprisoned by the U.S. fascist state. It is a prisoner-led project produced with the assistance of a few outside editors in collaboration with UBF Productions. This book aims to bring a prisoner’s perspective on the Black Lives Matter concept and a much-needed perspective on the Movement for Black Lives in its entirety. Almost a decade since the new Black protest movement became generalized in the streets, there are a number of internal contradictions that still exist, specifically when confronting the question of imprisoned peoples’ exclusion and erasure from this insurgency. The contributing writers and creators hope this book makes important connections between the struggles of (so-called) “non-imprisoned” Black populations and the organizing and cultural efforts of Black prisoners imagining otherwise. Key components of the project focus on state
violence and the abuse suffered by imprisoning people, the wide range of perspectives that prisoners hold on history and theories of the prison industrial complex and the abolition movement, and the methods of resistance from every day to the insurgent and spectacular that people inside U.S. gulags use to oppose their condition of enslavement.
There is something inherent to the experience of being subjected to racist carceral terror that gives movements that emerge in opposition to the prison the qualities of a proto vanguard formation.

I don’t think this could have been a more timely publication by our organization.