A Truthful Paragraph from Ajamu Baraka — about the Right to Resist Oppression

30 April 2015

Complacent cajolery is misplaced, when human rights are violated as a matter of de facto social policy

Ajamu Baraka’s angry paragraph caught my eye today. It is about the Baltimore’s unrest in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s still unexplained death in police custody:

Race and oppressive violence has always been at the center of the racist colonial project that is the U.S. It is only when the oppressed resist — when we decide, like Malcolm X said, that we must fight for our human rights — that we are counseled to be like Dr. King, including by war mongers like Barack Obama.

However, resistance to oppression is a right that the oppressed claim for themselves. It does not matter if it is sanctioned by the oppressor state, because that state has no legitimacy.

This is true.

The United States was literally built on the enslavement and oppression of people of African origin and descent

Strong shadows of that policy continue today with, at the forefront, our grossly biased criminal justice and police systems.

Everyone knows this. Yet nothing changes.

The Obama Administration’s pompously saccharine response to the Baltimore situation turned my stomach

For example, from the White House:

Press Secretary Josh Earnest reiterated that President Obama meant what he said when he called Baltimore rioters "thugs" earlier this week . . . .

"The fact of the matter is the vast majority of people who were expressing their concern about the treatment of Freddie Gray when he was in police custody have done so in a responsible way."

"What's also true and what did get the lion's share of the coverage in Baltimore, were the actions of a small minority that were nothing short of criminal actions. And whether it's arson or the looting of a liquor store, those were thuggish acts," Earnest continued.

A responsible way?

The Administration means a way that causes no one in power to lose sleep over rampant inequity and iniquity.

A leader, the President is not. A toady to institutional complacence, he is. He is not a man to bite the white plutocratic hands that feed him.

Given centuries of racial oppression — don’t whine about thugs and criminals failing to act decently in riot situations

American law enforcement, politics, and economics repeatedly give people reasons to rage.

Don’t act surprised when proportionately small groups of the anti-social and the aggressively untutored use those wings of justified anger to do things that most of us do not think are helpful.

Just as with war

Once we start the violence ball rolling, humanity’s unattractive tendencies are going to manifest. One cannot justifiably sprinkle tears of outraged regret after we diligently create the very conditions that guarantee that humanity’s basest impulses will be provoked into action.

Therefore, I have trouble getting excited about troops (for example) occasionally slaughtering innocents — or criminals setting their neighborhoods on fire — when those events manifest themselves under violence-provoking conditions that the rest of us knowingly created.

Smart people and smart societies do their best to avoid setting human beings up to fail.

Malcolm X and MLK

Mr. Baraka pointed to the still pertinent difference between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. My take is the same as his. I was a Malcolm respecter in my youth. Still am.

Martin Luther King’s then strategically necessary call to non-violence works with substantial effect only against systems that have an innate sense of fairness and decency, arguably like Great Britain’s. Recall Mahatma Ghandi’s success in colonial India. His movement’s example embarrassed and tormented the comparatively “decent” Brits into withdrawing.

The United States, in contrast, is historically violent to its roots. It will arguably never be graciously embarrassed by its penchant for smacking subject populations around.

Non-violence in America gets nods of approval from the oppressors, including the President. Actively peaceful people are easy to crush and control.

Martin Luther King’s peaceful route to human rights in America is not going to work in the foreseeable future

Witness the last 50 years of virtually no progress in treating our African American brothers and sisters with the social, political and economic respect that all human beings deserve.

The moral? — Genuine leadership comes at the price of making the rest of us uneasy in our sloth

We can (perhaps) imagine how Malcolm X would have reacted to Baltimore and to the nationwide string of publicized police-initiated murders that preceded it.

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A Truthful Paragraph from Ajamu Baraka — about the Right to Resist Oppression