{"id":19548,"date":"2016-09-25T00:00:52","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T08:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/?p=19548"},"modified":"2016-09-25T00:04:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T08:04:00","slug":"rouge-forum-dispatch-the-dispatch-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/rouge-forum-dispatch-the-dispatch-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Rouge Forum Dispatch: The Dispatch Lives!"},"content":{"rendered":"

We Say Fight Back!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The largest prison<\/u> strike in U.S. history has been going on for nearly a week,<\/strong> but there\u2019s a good chance you haven\u2019t heard about it. For months<\/a>, inmates at dozens of prisons across the country have been organizing through a network of smuggled cellphones, social media pages, and the support of allies on the outside. The effort culminated in a mass refusal to report to prison jobs on September 9, the anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a call to action against slavery in America,\u201d organizers wrote in an announcement<\/a> that for weeks circulated inside and outside prisons nationwide, and that sums up the strikers\u2019 primary demand: an end to free prison labor. \u201cForty-five years after Attica, the waves of change are returning to America\u2019s prisons. This September we hope to coordinate and generalize these protests, to build them into a single tidal shift that the American prison system cannot ignore or withstand.\u201dhttps:\/\/theintercept.com\/2016\/09\/16\/the-largest-prison-strike-in-u-s-history-enters-its-second-week\/<\/p>\n

Congratulations on the Publication of <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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and the release of <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"marciano\"<\/a>and<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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12 officers injured as protests break out in Charlotte after police fatally shoot man<\/h1>\n

Police in North Carolina shot and killed a black man they said was armed outside an apartment complex in Charlotte on Tuesday, setting off a tense confrontation between police and protesters that continued late into the night. The officer involved was also black, police told the Washington Post.<\/p>\n

A large crowd of demonstrators\u00a0began gathering near the scene of the shooting Tuesday evening\u00a0to protest the killing of Keith Lamont Scott, with some people chanting \u201cblack lives matter\u201d and \u201chands up, don\u2019t shoot.\u201d News reports and posts on social media showed police in riot gear firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the demonstrators and some people smashing out the windows of police cars.<\/p>\n

Police said 12 officers\u00a0were injured during the demonstrations, one of them hit in the face with a rock.\u00a0At least seven\u00a0people were\u00a0taken from the\u00a0demonstration and treated for non-life threatening injuries, the Charlotte Observer tweeted<\/a>.\u00a0 www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/morning-mix\/wp\/2016\/09\/21\/protests-break-out-in-charlotte-after-police-fatally-shoot-man-they-say-wielded-firearm\/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_mm-charlotte-1220am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory<\/a><\/p>\n

How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence<\/h1>\n
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I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon.<\/div>\n
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Adolph Reed, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania)<\/strong><\/div>\n
Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.<\/div>\n
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As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions.<\/div>\n
portside.org\/2016-09-24\/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-patterns-police-violence<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Breakdown Of US Citizens Killed By Cops In 2016<\/h1>\n
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by Tyler Durden<\/a> <\/b><\/div>\n

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Jul 10, 2016 (About 100 more dead by September)<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/a> <\/span> <\/a> <\/span> <\/a> <\/b><\/div>\n
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<\/b>In the U.S. a total of 509 citizens have been killed this year alone by police. The body count for the previous year stands at a grand total of 990 people shot dead, according to the Washington Post.<\/a> As the below infographic from Statista shows<\/a>, most of those killed by police are male and white.<\/em><\/span> Slightly more than half of the unarmed killed are Caucasian, as well as the majority who had toy guns. 123 of those shot were African Americans. This is a relatively high share, keeping in mind that 12 percent of African Americans belong to that ethnic group. The “Other” category is comprised of Asia-Pacific Islander Americans and Native Americans.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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You will find more statistics at Statista<\/a><\/em><\/b><\/div>\n
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What\u2019s also disturbing is that according to the data compiled by the Washington Post a big proportion of those killed obviously showed signs of mental illness<\/strong>. Of the 509 killed this year at least 124 were thought to be suffering from such conditions.<\/b><\/div>\n
Many of those killed carried guns according to police records. In at least 22 cases officers mistook toy guns for the real thing.<\/strong><\/em><\/b><\/div>\n
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Black Lives Matter and the Struggle for Freedom<\/h1>\n

Taylor shows that leading figures and organizations in the 1960s and \u201970s moved towards systemic, structural critiques of racism and U.S. society. Dr. King said that the black movement was \u201cforcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws\u2014racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism\u201d…One of the most important changes to the landscape of the historic black freedom struggle has been the rise of a black political elite. When twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray was murdered by Baltimore police\u2014a cell phone video showed him being \u201cdisappeared\u201d into a police van, emerging hours later with his spinal cord cut nearly in half\u2014the city erupted in protest. However, \u201cthis was no Ferguson.\u201d \u201cWhat distinguishes Baltimore from Ferguson and North Charleston [where a black man, Walter Scott, was gunned down by a white police officer two weeks before Freddie Gray was murdered in Baltimore] is that the black political establishment runs the city,\u201d Taylor writes. \u201cAfrican Americans control virtually the entire political apparatus.\u201d Black elected officials were quick to condemn the mostly black demonstrators.<\/p>\n

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and President Obama both condemned them as \u201ccriminals\u201d and \u201cthugs.\u201d Just like the white-dominated political establishment in Ferguson, Baltimore\u2019s black political establishment did not hesitate to call out city and state troops to clear the protesters off the streets. \u201cWhen a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a black woman to suppress a black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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some activists raise the model of disruptive actions by small groups to a political principle. Taylor argues instead that genuine liberation requires transcending capitalism, which in turn means building a movement that can, at some point, collaborate in highly coordinated ways on a large scale. She quotes historian Barbara Ransby: \u201cIf we think we can all \u2018get free\u2019 through individual or uncoordinated small-group resistance, we are kidding ourselves.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em>And if our goal in the long term is to achieve a mass<\/em> movement, in the short term, she writes, decentralized and \u201cleaderless\u201d organizing can make it harder for new people to join. As Taylor cautions, \u201cat a time when many people are trying to find an entry point into anti-police activism and desire to be involved, this particular method of organizing can actually narrow opportunities for the democratic involvement of many in favor of the tightly knit workings of those already in the know.\u201d21<\/a> Other important debates she takes up include the role of private foundations and philanthropy in contemporary activism and the importance of formulating and fighting for winnable demands, while keeping our eyes on the proverbial prize of black liberation. monthlyreview.org\/2016\/09\/01\/black-lives-matter-and-the-struggle-for-freedom\/<\/a><\/p>\n