From The Ramparts

     

                                               From The Ramparts

                                               Junious Ricardo Stanton

                                                   Law and Order

            When racial oppression gets so bad in this country, when Blacks say enough is enough and respond in kind to the violence the system routinely metes out on us and their responses threaten the status quo, the ruling class goes into conniptions calling for "law and order." Law and order are code words for oppression, a defense of and return to the status quo of 1% privilege and domination. Their calls for "law and order" are paradoxical given the history of white people in general and the history of this nation in particular. Notice white people never ever call for justice. They never implore for peace, compassion or harmony.

            The calls for law and order mean for the authorities to protect and defend the bestiality and brutal nature of their socio-economic and political system. Their insistence on "law and order" belies the fact violence and terror have been the primary means whites have used to maintain domination over the indigenous inhabitants of this nation and the people of color they imported here to do the back breaking work the 1%ers could not or would not do and supply the genius and other expertise whites did not posses.

            From jump street the US system denied legal and civil rights to non property owning whites, all females, Africans and indigenous inhabitants. The US Constitution the law of the land sanctioned slavery and the US government made money off of the trans- Atlantic slave trade; "up to ten dollars a head on those persons imported the states saw fit to import". That was US law and order.

             When the police were shot in Dallas and Baton Rouge a few weeks ago, it was the equivalent of the Gabriel Prosser ,Nat Turner uprisings or the Haitian Revolution. Those events sent fear, panic and alarm throughout the US.  The biggest fear whites have is we will repay tit for tat to them every vile thing they've done to us!

             These same people calling for "law and order" had no problem passing laws excluding Black people from engaging in certain professions, preventing Blacks from voting, or even remaining a certain locations if perchance they were free during slavery. Following the War Between the States when for a brief period Black men could vote and hold office, the Southern 1% pressed for the removal of the US troops from the South who were maintaining order and protecting Black people. The Southern 1% abhorred the post war "law and order" imposed upon the South because they were prevented from holding the reigns of power and excluded from participating in the political process! They were determined to end "Reconstruction" and return to the "law and order" they felt comfortable with.  Once the troops left Southern whites went on a rampage of violence and terror that continued with impunity until the late 1960's.

             When Blacks migrated North and West we were still subject to oppression and violence. Today's police shootings of Blacks are merely a continuation of those policies.

Black people have never experienced equal protection or respect under their laws, we have never fully enjoyed the benefits of the law. In the early Twentieth Century when Black people pleaded with the US Congress to pass anti-lynching laws their pleas were ignored.

              It took the Civil Rights movement which consisted of aggressive activism, law suits, civil disobedience, demonstrations, boycotts and on occasion violence to break the US legal system of apartheid and the Black Codes that prescribed just about every aspect of life for Black people in the South.  

            Today when white people call for "law and order" this is what they mean, a return to those days!

                                                                        -30-