This month, State media sees fit again to memorialize the struggle for justice and human rights. As with most presentations on labor, anti-war, and civil rights activism, the producers seem to suggest by-gone battles, ultimately won, and finally archived in black and white film footage and barely audible audio tapes. History!

The battles to end war, the battles for justice and human rights, and the battle to end the suffering of a vast majority of humanity are over.

PBS’s Conservation and Civil War series establishes narratives featuring the ingenuity and forbearance of the American people. Inserts depicting the desperate attempts of Indigenous Americans to maintain their lands and freedom and of Black enslaved Americans happy in the days following “Emancipation” suggests benign conquests of land and resources and labor. Look around, everyone ultimately benefited!

American viewers should pat themselves on the back. A vacation at Yellowstone Park is the reward for human ingenuity. A re-enactment of the Civil War complete with waving Confederate flags is the reward for forbearance.

Here we are again, gazing into the past, memorializing the freedom riders, those young Blacks and whites who, during the summer of 1961, defied the racial segregation laws and sought to integrate public facilities in the South. Bad things happened and people died. But Americans should pat themselves on the back. Those days are over! The nation overcame its racism and Blacks are free at long last.

The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990s… Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990s and reached historic highs in the past few years… by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated, Erik Eckholm, New York Times, March 20, 2006.

While the rates for violent crime may have decreased, the U.S. incarcerates more citizens that any other nation. “One in every 15 Black men is incarcerated,” Daryl Hannah (DiversityInc, 2008), and the incarceration rate for Black men between the ages of 20-34 jumps to 40 percent to one in every nine, compared to one in every 106 white men.”

What entity do these presentations of Black resistance serve?

“See in my line of work,” Bush II said in 2005, “you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda…”

Catapult the propaganda with a vision and images flashed before the American people, over and over again, and watched as the “truth” supplanting black and white images of dogs snarling at Black protesters and charred bodies of Black children recovered from a bombed church with the Thug, the dangerous criminal. The gangsterization of Black men suggests to the world that the American people, freeing themselves from their racist past, today have to contend with a violent element in their midst - with the maximization of profits in mind.

The battle was then as it is now: a continuum of struggle between the Freedom Fighter and the Capitalist, between movements for freedom, justice and those for American progress. The root of this battle has its origin in an economic system that depended on the exploitation of Black labor, but even efforts to maximize profits - the near destruction of the Black family, Black familial relations and Black determination - could not destroy the Black spirit to resist.

Not then, but now! In this second era of Jim Crow, the manipulators of this economic system have succeeded in producing the “Just-Us” caste, captured for the benefit of an ever-expanding judicial/prison industrial complex, and “free” caste of consumer addicts, mostly Black women, who according to Daryl Hannah, are worth “a projected $600 billion in buying power alone! (2009). “Caste systems,” writes Claire Robertson, “have real economic underpinnings, as does patriarchal and racist ideology” - that can only be “changed by attacking their economic foundations” (“Africa in the Americas?” More than Chattel Slavery).

But where is the Black challenge to this murderous economic system? Frozen! The Black freedom fighter is frozen in place, memorialized in museums and in documentaries that suggest that only the unwise and unhappy Black would consider challenging capitalism today.

The struggle for justice is “old school,” right? Listen to the affirmation and warning in the words of the “Black” president - “There’s something about the American spirit - inherent in the American spirit –we don’t hang on to the past. We always move forward.” (2009)

Freedom Riders were then; BMW riders are now!

Journalist Linn Washington Jr. is right to suggests that what we are witness to in the U.S. is terrorism. “This terrorism is a tyranny predating the birth of al Qaeda: institutional racism and its related deprivations like vicious retaliation against anyone objecting to unlawful institutional inequities” (“Obama’s Terror War Misses Domestic Targets,” May 11, 2011). Sit back and enjoy glimpses the old days while we handle the little matter of Bin Laden’s death, once again, and pique your interest in American progress - its “finest” freedom fighters - the U.S. Navy Seals!

If you tell them that tyranny is something that dictators commit against their people….repeat it over and over again - Catapult the propaganda!

Writer and thinker bell hooks noted that one “effective strategy of white supremacist terror and dehumanization during slavery centered on white control of the black gaze” (killing rage: Ending Racism). Little has changed today. To look at the history of global terrorism is to look on the perpetrator - the U.S. Empire - and court with death itself. But to live outside the struggle for justice is no life at all. To reject the memorialized struggle is to pursue an end to tyranny and injustice.

“If ever there were a time for political dissent in this nation - it is now! The words of Howard Zinn ring clear, strong, and true today: ‘Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.’ It is in the name of not only this nation, but of all of humanity that people of conscience must dissent!” (Larry Pinkney, Columnist and Editorial Board Member, Black Commentator, May 19, 2011).

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.