Updates on Baltimore from Savant (who actually lives in Baltimore)

Tu dois visiter un eglise noir pendant un de vos voyages en Amerique. Je crois que votre tutor Afro-American ici est un intellectual et pas tres religieux. Il ne vous introduit pas des eglise noir. Au Baltimore maintenant beacoup des notre "town hall" meetings sont dans les eglise Noir. Some of the spokepersons de La Resistance contra la terrrorisme de la police sont preachers---par exemple, Rev. Jamal Bryant. Je crois que le Catholicism, come tous religions, ont positive and negative tendencies. A L'Amerique Latin, l'eglise est souvent part de la lutte pour la liberation des pauvres. Par examples, Bishop Oscar Romera ou Padre Camillo Torres of Columbia. Aux Etas-Unis, c'est tres complexe. There is a deep strain of anti-Black racism among Irish Catholics, surtout a Boston. I've seen a bit of this in Baltimore aussi. Irish Catholics from Ireland qui visite l'Amerique are often stunned by the degree of anti-Black racism among many Irish Catholic Americains. In Ireland itself le Mouvement Afro-Americain des annees 60s has been an inspiration t their resistance to British tyranny. Dr. King is deeply revered over their. (Une femme Catholiqe from Ireland who was here during the crisis relating to the busing program to integrate Boston schools was shocked an embarrassed that her American cousins, so to speak, were so deeply hostile to Black Americans, and that some had even taken to mob violence against buses of Blacks school children). Mais il y'avait aussi les activiste progressive qui supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Not in as large proportion que les Juifs, but in substantial numbers. It may be that Mario Savio, who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer before leading the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley U, was of Catholic background.

-Savant

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The KKK were FASCISTS, but were members of both corporate parties. And frankly, I despise both Republicans and Democrats as hirelings of the 1%.

-Savant

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It's remarkable how much time is spent talking nonsense. Guess what? If you bump into one of our loony fascist pig cops in Baltimore or other cities, the pig won't care (or even notice) if you're Black American, African or West Indian.

-Savant

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There's no end to it. And some voices in the Black community, though not presently a majority, are beginning to propose the forming of armed self-defense groups.

-Savant

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Here in Baltimore we've seen whites, Asians, Latinos and numerous others rallying to our cause. There is an awakening underway. And it unnerves reactionaries like Masud.

-Savant

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It is commonplace for someone to start talking about "black crime" whenever the issue of racism or police brutality against Africans Americans is raised. Mainly this is a deflection. But actually, police brutality and crime are related; though not in the way reactionaries imagine. The fratricidal activities in oppressed communities are actually the dysfunctional reactions to oppression itself. Oppression breeds dysfunction (which is why you also find some much of the same problems in poor white and Latino communities.) Moreover, the police are the armed enforcers of the oppressive power structure of racism and economic exploitation--whic h is one of the reasons that talk about good vs bad cops is largely irrelevant. Moreover, every kid in the ghettoes knows about the criminality of the police themselves. For examples, open air drug markets--unimagina ble in affluent white communities--opera te within full view of the cops in the ghetto; and everyone KNOWS it. Hence the one of the reasons (aside from racism and brutality) for the widespread contempt in the hood for the police. Actually, the issue is justice; and the only other side is injustice. The system of injustice, of structural racism and economic exploitation and dispossession, is the roots both of crime and police terror. Moreover, history has shown that whenever there is a high level of social activism, of progressive and revolutionary struggle, crime tends to drop. The black cirme rate dropped 60% during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In sections of NYC where the Black Panthers and similar groups exerted great influence, prostitution and dope peddling tended to dry up as youth were engaged in liberatory struggle. I PERSONALLY observed this as a youngster in the neighborhood in East Baltimore (an area similar to the one in which Freddy gray lived). When the Black Panthers and others moved into the area where we lived and began to form educational programs, clinics, breakfast for children, and community patrols of police (which were also quite effective against dope dealers and pimps) the neighborhood became safer for us. As for most black leaders ---opportunistic poseurs of the black bourgeoisie--they can't effectively address issues of crime, poverty, police brutality or anything else because they're not committed to any liberation struggle to end oppression. They mainly about furthering their class interests. And like Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama who denounced our kids as "criminals " and "thugs" (but were not so denunciatory of the fascist pig cops, or the predatory corporate elite which created the social misery we see in the ghetto and elsewhere), we see that when their own class interests are threatened by the masses of Black folk, they are just as contemptuous of the people as the most rabid white racist. No, the entire police system must be dismantled and replace by a force democratically controlled by the community itself, and we must curtail (eventually terminated) the powers of the racists and corporate predators whose piratical system created this crisis to begin with.

-Savant

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The term reactionary fits a good number of people, as do terms such as racist, and so forth. As for the extraordinary affluence you think is available to the average person, you need to be better informed about the USA, and maybe even about Europe. Everywhere there is a growing divide between the haves and have nots; and this may be greater in America than in Europe. You say that the average person has more to protect than every before. Maybe there's something to that in Scandinavia. In America, people are generally poorer than they were one or two generation ago. More people have lost homes and jobs than ever since the Great Depression. The average standard of living is lower than it was 40--50 years ago. The old working class has been virtually destroyed by the electronic revolution in national and global capitalism. And the new proletariat is increasingly LESS like the working class that Marx and others envisioned and more like the ancient Roman proletariat, a class increasingly forced out of productive work altogether. What important about this is that WHITES in America have been impoverished to an extent unimaginable since the Depression. Blacks, on the other hand, have lived under Depression like conditions in this racist corporate regime even during periods of relative economic stability. Even former Pres. Clinton acknowledged that America could not tolerate the general level of poverty among whites to reach the depths it has in Black and Latino America. And as Noam Chomsky once noted, if the police and the judiciary were allowed to operate within white America as they do as a matter of course in black and brown America, the USA would already be regarded as a fascist state. The impoverishment of the American people, the global deprivation of people nearly everywhere by growing divide between haves and have nots, is generating a situation in which massive progressive movements are becoming possible and appealing again. Unfortunately, reactionary movements from Golden Dawn to America's Christian Right are also enabled by these tendencies. So fascism is still possible. It's partially already operable in Black communities. But something new is also happening, from Occupy to the Black Lives Matter Movement, to militant labor in Wisconsin. Interestingly, enough it was recently noted in one study that about 60% of American WHITES now believe that America has an unjust income system and class system. About 75% of Blacks believe the same. But this recognition is actually more RECENT among whites, whereas Blacks have perceived this system as unjust for as long as anyone have recorded our views of the matter. It may be that the rest of America is coming slowly but surely to our point of view. And it may not be a coincidence that the black lives matters movement is drawing so many whites, Latins, Asians, Jews, Arabs (in Ferguson Jews and Palestinian Americans who hardly talk were marching together against police terror is a movement started by young black women) , East Indians and others have been marching with us against police, and that this may even be larger than the Occupy Movement.

-Savant

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Well I've tired myself out between school and these meeting and demonstrations. But the semester is coming to a close, and emphasis is shifting toward organizing all this popular energy in Baltimore. Some of my students were involved. And I didn't hesitate to tell them how proud of them I am. "I am impressed" said I to some of my students. "Not since I was a kid during the 1960s has Baltimore seen such MASS demonstrations and demands for justice.." I'd like to give them extra credit for their civic engagement, but that might be crossing the line. LOL! I hope you have a wonderful day, Sioux sister....and, perhaps a happy Mother's Day tomorrow.

-Savant
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You know, black on black crime isn't the big mystery some take it to be. Oppression breeds dysfunction; and this has been noted among the poor in Latin America, among white American poor, and among the "wretched of the earth" in various parts of the world. Paulo Freirie talks about this in PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED, and Frantz Fanon more famously in THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH. (And I highly recommend Fanon). Dr. King and Malcolm X both talked about this phenomenon, and it has been noted than when liberation struggles reach a certain height, a certain intensity, crime tends to drop. As a kid I saw that happening in my East Baltimore hood when the Panthers started organizing and offering alternatives to ghetto youth. In Montgomery, Al during the 1955 Bus Boycott that made famous Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, the crime rate dropped by 60%. The role of liberation struggle in reducing crime and even certain psychosocial disorders among the oppressed has been noted by Fanon, and by some leaders of our movement during the 1960s. (Check out FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS: MLK and the FIGHT FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE). If you want to heal emotional injuries and dysfunctons induced by oppression you must fight oppression. Only this can no longer be a matter of a "Birmingham Campaign" or Montgomeruy Boycott. We must have a PROTRACTED liberation struggle to reconstruct society, our communities, and our personal and social lives.

-Savant