Between August 9 and August 20, 2014, America was treated to the ugliest display and manifestation of the active infestation of racism in this society. As some segments of the media praised Ferguson police for showing “restraint” because they did not use live bullets to kill dozens of demonstrators, apparently something that should have been expected, the emotions mixed with anger and sadness were raw on Sunday August 24, as one of Melissa Harris Perry’s guests – Elon James White – recounted emotionally on MSNBC the heroine experience that he and other demonstrators survived in Ferguson, when they were viciously attacked with flares and tear gas over several nights of protesting. Tear gas is a nerve agent used as a weapon of mass destruction. A Duke University anesthesiologist explained on Harris Perry's show how the gas works by causing fear, pain, and real panic. It is a nerve agent which is delivered in the form of a toxic chemical explosion, which incapacitates the recipients and by activities the nerve endings in the sinuses and causes a sensation of suffixation.  What is clear is that America has so devalued the life of Black African Americans over the years, through government policies aimed at criminalizing and incarcerating Black people in mass, especially young Black males, that the life expectancy of a Black male in the United States today is about 18 years old. Those policies have primarily been implemented in the criminal justice system as a means to extend slavery through a managed system of occupation of Blacks, and to facilitate the denial of housing, employment, social mobility, and the dispossession of basic rights, such as voting, and the right to life itself.

Controlling the movement, activities, and the lives of Black Americans was made a priority and had been long implemented post “desegregation” through a variety of means, deriving from the politics of “tough on crime,” “the war on drug,”  three strikes you’re out,” and “minimum sentencing.” This follows a simple equation, which politicians – Democrats and Republicans – have helped to promote: Black people are strange, foreign bodies that are a burden on America and do not belong in the mainstream of American society. Therefore, if you cannot enslave them or legally segregate them, the government, using police as a conduit, must manage them through whatever brutal form of repressive and oppressive means necessary, including military occupation, in this case a militarized police force, or even murder. This also makes it easier to deny such group of people individual rights, economic mobility, and social equality. 

Today, Blacks in America still live as they did under the 1890's Jim Crow laws enacted by Southern States to enforce segregation. Most Blacks function in American society by trying every day to be compliant with unjust laws and policies, and to turn a blind eye to blatant acts of bigotry and discrimination, in order to avoid being a victim of racially-motivated attacks by Whites or the victims of violence by police, or the target of more racially-motivated policies by unscrupulous politicians who commonly use opportunistic tactics to target Blacks to help them get elected to office. Almost in every election, and as recently as the elections of 2012, right-wing politicians literally binge on a slew of adverse and damaging characteristics that Whites in this country have assigned to Blacks for over four hundred years: they are lazy takers, and criminally-minded people with no personal, professional, or family values. Those are the same Blacks who were kept working for hours on end on plantations, breaking their backs to allow this country to be built. Yet, they survived on little and committed no crime against the criminals who started trafficking them and held them hostage beginning in the 1600’s.

Surely there was widespread shock around the nation at the response of a militarized police force against protesters. However, one cannot escape the fact that polling results released the Pew Research Center show up to 81% of Blacks believe that the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson police raises serious questions about racial tension in America, while as many as 47 % of Whites told the researchers that the issue of race was getting too much attention in the killing of the unarmed teenager. Similarly, while 65% of African Americans responded that the police went too far in their response to the ensuing demonstration, only 33% of Whites said that the Ferguson police had gone too far, and 32% said the police had not gone far enough, and 35% refused to answer. In addition, the results found that Whites were nearly 3 times as Blacks, 52% to 18% to express confidence in the State and police investigation into the shooting. A New York Times/CBS News poll release simultaneously found similar results.

The perception of Blacks in America as unworthy of even life, never mind liberty or the pursuit of happiness as stipulated in the Declaration of Independence by the Founding Fathers, has its roots in slavery. In order to travel to Africa and kidnap Africans, bring them to the Americas, sell them into slavery, and treat them like animals, Europeans needed first to dehumanize them. Once you take away people’s dignity, that is the little part of God in them that makes us all equal in the eye of the Almighty Universal Spirit, then the general populace is ready to accept whatever atrocious, barbaric, masochistic treatment you impose on such people, and any degree of uncivilized conduct you might engage in vis a vis those people. An example of this is that many Europeans, such as the Irish, Italians, and others who arrived in this America far past slavery, and came to this country themselves fleeing horrible conditions in their homelands, ended up buying into the notions that Blacks are inferior beings with no innate worth. These false conceptions were sold supported with fabricated statistics like Blacks are intellectually inferior, do not feel pain, possess super power, and commit more crime than Whites (50% of 35 million versus 20% of 275 million). These ideas are still being pushed today by pseudo intellectuals and morally bankrupt political hacks, such as Bill Crystal of the conservative Weekly Standard, Joe Klein of the Time Magazine, George Will of the State of Union, right wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, and plenty of others who continue to perpetuate these myths and thereby continue to propagate widespread prejudice and discriminatory behavior toward Blacks.

In the 1980's and 1990's, both Ronald Reagan and George H. Walker Bush proposed that law enforcement used "whatever measures necessary" to end protests in Black communities. Last week saw many analysts and commentators, as well as politicians, question and decry the militarization of police in America. Although this phenomenon escalated after the attack on the World Trade Center by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, this militarization of police, the terrorizing of the civilian population at the name of the war on drugs, the breaking down of doors of houses inhabited by women, children, the disabled, and the elderly, and the military-style raids and warrant less stop, searches, and false arrests, have all taken hold in American life right under our noses over the past three decades. Following September 11, and as America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wined down, both Democrats and Republicans approved a Pentagon program to pass on excess war equipment, including high powered weapons, armored vehicle and tanks to police forces all around the country. In 2012, State and local police received 35 Billion dollars from this program, and 2013 assets from Homeland Security to militarize State and local police amounted to 449 million dollars. It should not have surprised anyone that the police in one town in America deployed those weapons on mostly Black protesters in residential areas that are homes to 60% of Blacks in the town of Ferguson. This could have happened anywhere in America where there is a large population of African Americans. When Ferguson police demanded demonstrators clear out by dark, they were essentially re-instating early and mid-1990 century laws that were enacted to control the movement and behavior of Black around the country: The 1920 Sundown towns; The 1941 Missouri 6:00 PM Whistle and Twilight (clear out) laws, and similar laws in Minnesota and California in 1956. In Wisconsin, a “no drought – no mosquito – no Malaria – no Black” policy was declared.

The video footage out of Ferguson Missouri over the course of 11 days was a disgrace for American society, and a complete failure of leadership at the governmental level. What took place was also a letdown of epic proportion by today’s Civil Rights leaders who have failed to organize the Black community, attend to the needs of Blacks in America for economic growth, social advancement, and a solidification of the progress that was made by earlier figures and politicians, Black and White, up to 1964. Beginning in the 1970’s, opposing forces doubled their effort to roll back all advantages and achievements that were made up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, championed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Blacks were no longer allowed to articulate grievances or discuss the effects of prejudice, racism, and discrimination on their every day lives. As segregation was outsourced to the real Estate and Housing Markets, Blacks were pushed away into less prosperous economic areas with non-performing schools deprived of resources, high unemployment, and dilapidated infrastructures. All legitimate complaints by Blacks have since been slapped down as “playing the race card,” and Greater America continued to look upon Blacks as unworthy and undesired foreign bodies among them.

With the rise of the extreme Right Wing, the opposition to all things Obama within the Tea Party and the Republican Party at-large, the elections of the first Black American seems to have exacerbated racial animus in America and rendered Blacks even more vulnerable to abuse and attack and violent acts in this country. And police has been at the forefront of this deconstruction of the Civil Rights gains that were achieved in the 1960’s, and they are generally supported by a segment of the White population that will express more outrage at the abuse of a dog than the callous and criminal act of killing a Black human in cold blood. The depravity of racism has left this county mentally unbalanced, morally unfit, and socially outside the norms of the civilized world. Mimicking a mental illnesses, the germs of racism have infected the carriers and the sufferers alike. Forced into poverty and marginalized, or simply in protest, many Blacks have displayed the very characteristics that were originally falsely and by purpose attributed to the Black population, and thereby the establishment of a vicious cycle in a sewer of distrust, hate, and malfeasance, that has taken hold between Blacks and Whites in America. This pattern will continue, as the Black population cannot change this alone, no matter how willing or ready. The knee-jerk reaction by most Whites that they cannot be racist because they did not live during slavery is patently absurd and infantile. Even if a person is not a racist, complacency in the face of social injustice is never an option. Anyone who is serious about bringing change and leaving this world better than they found it must get involved with those who are working to generate change. White, Latinos, Native American Indians, and Asians, all must join to help turn this around. No government declare open warfare on the people if they march by thousands and millions. We have seen the power of the people around the world when they come together to generate change, many times at the risk of dying. We have witnessed populations standing up and declaring, "We The People" from Egypt to Kiev to Turkey to Pakistan to Brazil. When they French rise they rise together. At this time, the key to ending this old and revolting way of racial hostility and tyranny in America rests firmly in the hands of White Americans as a whole.