"We Charge Genocide"
Jun. 27th, 2005 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frandroidMass Incarceration is Genocide
Black America has always stood for the rule of law, despite the fact that American law has so often ruled against us. It does so every day, in vast disproportion to the anti-social behavior of some African American individuals. Guantanamo Bay is, indeed, part of an international “gulag” of American prisons, dotting the globe, as Amnesty International has declared. But the largest “gulag” in the world is in the United States – half Black and only 30 percent white, in a 70 percent white country. Fully one out of eight incarcerated human beings on earth are African American, the casualties of an internal war that has not ceased since the Euro-American aggressions against Africa. Rather, it escalates.
At our next grand convention, we must state in no uncertain terms that the real crime wave is being committed against us by all levels of U.S. governments, which have placed Black people under surveillance for the purpose of incarcerating them, and devised laws that impact most heavily on our communities. Mass Black incarceration is a legacy of slavery and, therefore, a form of genocide. “We Charge Genocide,” again – because our social structures are being deliberately destroyed through government policy. Our language must make that plain.
--From Reject the language of White Supremacy in The Black Commentator, which is really radical in a way that anyone can relate to.
I highlighted the text that shocked me the most, but let me clarify it, so you don't make the same mistake I did: 1 out of 8 of all incarcerated humans worldwide are African American, i.e. just Blacks in the U.S. That 1/8th does not include "African Africans", if I may use that term again.
"We Charge genocide" in the original text linked to this page, which is quite an interesting page on a Genocide against black people petition that was put to the U.N. shortly after the Convention Against Genocide was passed, which in a way was one of the first steps of the Civil Rights Movement. I note in particular this paragraph:
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted Dec. 9, 1948, flowed from the determination of the world community that never again would fascism be allowed to plunge humanity into holocaust and world war. Patterson pointed out that the U.S. stubbornly refused to ratify the convention even as American officials boasted of U.S. democracy and lectured other nations on human rights abuses, a do as I say, not as I do posture. (The U.S. did not ratify the Genocide Convention until Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) finally pushed it through the U.S. Senate in 1987.)
Black America has always stood for the rule of law, despite the fact that American law has so often ruled against us. It does so every day, in vast disproportion to the anti-social behavior of some African American individuals. Guantanamo Bay is, indeed, part of an international “gulag” of American prisons, dotting the globe, as Amnesty International has declared. But the largest “gulag” in the world is in the United States – half Black and only 30 percent white, in a 70 percent white country. Fully one out of eight incarcerated human beings on earth are African American, the casualties of an internal war that has not ceased since the Euro-American aggressions against Africa. Rather, it escalates.
At our next grand convention, we must state in no uncertain terms that the real crime wave is being committed against us by all levels of U.S. governments, which have placed Black people under surveillance for the purpose of incarcerating them, and devised laws that impact most heavily on our communities. Mass Black incarceration is a legacy of slavery and, therefore, a form of genocide. “We Charge Genocide,” again – because our social structures are being deliberately destroyed through government policy. Our language must make that plain.
--From Reject the language of White Supremacy in The Black Commentator, which is really radical in a way that anyone can relate to.
I highlighted the text that shocked me the most, but let me clarify it, so you don't make the same mistake I did: 1 out of 8 of all incarcerated humans worldwide are African American, i.e. just Blacks in the U.S. That 1/8th does not include "African Africans", if I may use that term again.
"We Charge genocide" in the original text linked to this page, which is quite an interesting page on a Genocide against black people petition that was put to the U.N. shortly after the Convention Against Genocide was passed, which in a way was one of the first steps of the Civil Rights Movement. I note in particular this paragraph:
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted Dec. 9, 1948, flowed from the determination of the world community that never again would fascism be allowed to plunge humanity into holocaust and world war. Patterson pointed out that the U.S. stubbornly refused to ratify the convention even as American officials boasted of U.S. democracy and lectured other nations on human rights abuses, a do as I say, not as I do posture. (The U.S. did not ratify the Genocide Convention until Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) finally pushed it through the U.S. Senate in 1987.)
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Date: 2005-06-27 08:57 pm (UTC)