WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?
1999
“Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned and demonstrated, among other things, to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have been historically perpetrated against Black people. All of these efforts have been answered by more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy. . . . City Hall turns a deaf ear to the pleas of Black people for relief from this increasing terror.”
—Dr. Huey P. Newton
The much-ballyhooed recent event held in the Meadowlands, New Jersey—a benefit concert for this writer’s legal funds by Rage Against the Machine, the Beastie Boys, Bad Religion, members of Chumbawamba, and Black Star—has become the food for many a newspaper or radio station, hungry for the stuff of spectacle.19 The musicians were assaulted by a litany of complaints, and were vilified by police and their political agents, on the basis that for such musicians to dare speak out in the interest of fairness and justice for a man encaged on Death Row was some kind of violation.
Politicians raged and spluttered, and lamented that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would not allow them to stop the proposed concert. Why should that so very hallowed constitutional principle hold when the players wanted to play, but be ignored when the young people and organizers wanted to pass out or sell information?
How special is the First Amendment? It isn’t.
To the brave and principled groups that dared to play despite the bared fangs of the state’s hostility, we must all send our salutes and our kudos. They have done something that was truly remarkable.
To the state, we must send our hisses, and wonder at their strange sense of Selective Outrage.
When a group of young college students were en route to Central State University and were shot by a cabal of New Jersey State Troopers after being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, where was the outrage?
When young men are shot by cops in the streets of Newark, Camden, Elizabeth, Asbury Park or any other city where Black people live, where is the outrage?
When there is monstrous disparity between the state’s funding for students of impoverished families in Camden, and the children of wealth and means in Princeton at primary and secondary levels—where is the outrage?
When those charged “to protect and serve” fire more than 40 shots at an unarmed man—Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo—while he is standing in his Bronx doorway, after which the state’s propaganda forces, the white supremacist press, call for “calm” and a “wait-and-see” attitude, where is the outrage?
Given the recent attacks on Black folks and the poor around the nation, who are the unarmed victims of militarized police power and who are blown into oblivion by the police with utter impunity: where is the outrage?
If one examines these and other instances, one finds that there is no outrage, for it is not outrageous to the political and economic elite when Black and poor people are summarily executed by the state. This is exactly what is to be expected. It is nothing exceptional. It is their warped status quo.
When the system kills Blacks, there is no outrage, for it has been normalized by centuries of white enslavement, terrorism, and injustice. Such violence is simply the accepted way of how things are.
When people stand up to this system, when they unite against the morbid forces of death, the media will bay “outrage,” while their real fear is the potential unity of the people, for it is in the media’s commercial interest for the population to remain atomized, isolated, and divided against each other.
The unity of the people is the greatest weapon against the silence, fear, and oppression imposed by the system.
Our unity—as communities, networks, and movements—is so important. Therefore, our unity is attacked.
What makes the Meadowlands incident remarkable is that it occurred in the face of vicious, unprincipled, and naked attacks against all of those on Death Row, not just one man. Several years ago, the state and federal government cut all funding to all post-conviction legal services to all people on Pennsylvania’s Death Row. They are now completely undefended, and are at the “tender mercies” of the state that wishes to kill them. That so many good people would assemble to assist the defense of just one of that number is an act of resistance to the system that would deny any meaningful defense to them all.
There should be outrage against a system that dares to call such a perverted system a fair one. There should be outrage against those who sit in silence when the rights of any are denied. There should be a swelling sense of outrage at the system that cries alligator tears when one man is defended, while 209 men and women remain undefended.
The death penalty is an outrage, one kept in operation by a conspiracy of state terror, a bare shadow of “defense,” and the vicious political will of base prosecutors who care more for their career than what is truly just.
It is an outrage. Isn’t it?
WHAT IS THE FOURTH OF JULY FOR?
June 19, 1999
“When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that: ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie.’ The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day for burning fire-crackers!”
—Abraham Lincoln
This Fourth of July, the parks, shores, and play-places of the people will be filled to the brim with tens of millions of Americans who are enjoying their vacation weekend in the hot summer sun. It is truly a holiday, and nothing else. But what does it celebrate?
We are told from our infancy that this date celebrates the blessings of freedom and liberty from oppression. While this claim is repeated year after year, the truths taught us by bitter history reveal a long legacy of oppression, repression, and death. The history of this country is rife with the foul excrescence of racialized human bondage and enslavement. Until the addition of the Thirteenth Amendment, the word “slavery” was absent from the very text of the United States Constitution. Former president, and counsel for The Amistad, John Quincy Adams made that point plain: “The words slave and slavery are studiously excluded from the Constitution; circumlocutions are the fig-leaves under which these parts of the body politic are decently concealed.”20