Category: View from the Battlefield

According to one poll, nearly half of Americans don’t know that the Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. They don’t even know that the little country of 3.5 million residents has been a U.S. colony since 1898 with its indigenous people forced to become U.S. citizens in 1917.

Protests abound because injustice abounds. In the U.S. when people of African descent rise up to resist the never-ending onslaught of racist attitudes, practices and laws, the last thing we want to hear is a critique by those of European descent as to how we should protest our own oppression.

Contrary to popular white conservative beliefs, racial profiling and criminalizing Black youth doesn’t just happen on urban streets in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. It happens to young, Black people on idyllic college campuses seeking for the American dream. It happens wherever there are Black bodies.

With another racist acquittal of a killer cop, the haunting question is what we have learned about justice and injustice since the 2014 Ferguson Uprising. The “we” is both public decision-makers and our racial justice movement.

In a nation where Black lives rarely matter and where Black people have been relentlessly pointing out the deadly disparities in policing, will this be the time when white America’s empathy translates to solidarity with the endless pain of Black and Brown communities?

Declining teen birth rates is great news but we can’t sit on our laurels. Let’s continue to show young boys and girls the benefits of delaying sex and having babies by making sure there are plenty of opportunities for supervised fun, academic enrichment and personal development.

Fearing for one’s police life seems to have no real criteria. Everyone looks big and black to a cop. Police procedure and training get thrown out the window when blackness is involved.

The peril of the planet cannot possibly be understood in its totality by these two buffoons who reject evidence-based facts and truths. Most of us would respect these facts as science and welcome any positive steps to chart a meaningful course on global climate change.

The 1992 acquittal sent a reverberating message that even with a horrific, irrefutable visual proof of brutality, white police would suffer no consequences for their actions. As a long, hot summer approaches, we need to study the 25 years before the acquittals and the 25 years since to sharpen our analysis and to inform our strategy around state repression.

In our current situation, to resist is to almost be passive. It’s like trying to hold back the floodgates of neo-liberalism but not move forward. There must be an action verb connected to resist. Resist and rebuild. Resist and renew. Resist and organize.