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by Joe A’Jene Valentine
“The FBI’s actions perpetuated twin harms. The agency surveilled, monitored and at times tried to disrupt the Civil Rights movement, particularly through its COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) which was begun in the 1950s to disrupt the Communist related groups and reformulated in 1967 to disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black Nationalist hate-type organizations. Equally important, it stood aside amidst escalating violence on Black people and Black activists in particular. The FBI regularly cast white racist violence outside of its jurisdiction even when agents witnessed it or had inside information about it. It monitored the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but was unconcerned with the bombing of boycott leaders’ homes. It had early knowledge of incoming violence against the Freedom Rides, but stood aside and let it happen. In many ways, FBI inactions sanctioned violence against Civil Rights workers.” – Jeanne Theoharis, “A more beautiful and terrible history,” p.181.
I’m certain that the wicked irony of the FBI’s COINTELPRO definition and description with regards to its referring to our organizations, Black Nationalist or Black Power formations, as that of Black Nationalist hate-type organizations, didn’t escape anyone, huh? This is precisely what I mean when I emphasize the topsy-turvy nature of the world; a world order established via European colonial powers, colonial powers which made the world in their own image and on the basis of their specifically defined interests, whence it’s our formations which were and are conveniently conceptualized as that of Black Nationalist hate-type organizations, when in truth it was and remains white nationalist racist type organizations, e.g. law enforcement, the U.S. military, CIA, FBI, prison guards/prison officials etc., all immersed in a thoroughly white supremacist or an orientation which constitutes and represents the actual and true hate-type organizations, just as their history of institutional racism and colonial policies rooted in racist genocidal methods, genocidal racist methods in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany adopted – and practices prove – even as everybody knows that J. Edgar Hoover was a definite white supremacist to his rotten-ass core.
How is it realistically possible for the people whom are dominated and oppressed under white supremacist genocidal ideas and practices as Black people are in this country, supposedly the ones whom are hate-type organizations, while the white racist males who designated and operated organizations like the FBI, CIA, Sheriffs, state troopers, Pinkertons, police, Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force, prison guards etc., become the righteous saviors of democracy without there obviously existing outright deep and cruel hypocrisy?
Yes, those struggling against the hatred, killing racism of white supremacy is manifest via the United States’ governments, corporations, real estate agencies, court systems, financial bank entities, military, department of corrections, law enforcement etc., etc., are the ones who defined and perceived, quite tactfully I might add, as full of “hatred,” for being resolved to resist institutional racism and oppression, i.e., in the enemy’s world, what they represent and practice is love, fairness, decency, democracy, reason etc., etc.
Black folks’ sentiments and natural reactions to white supremacist practices and ideas are seen to be and treated as irrational, misplaced, unnecessary, over-reactive, improper etc., which to my mind in itself is a definite expression of white supremacist thinking since it is they who presume to define for us what it is as a people that we experience, just as did and does racist-fascist prison guards and prison officials who had the damn gall to purport to define for us that of the New Afrikan ideology, in terms of its origins as a pretext to validate Black prisoners who subscribe to this particular political ideology.
What we must grasp is New African or so-called African American Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War – just as ancestors like Nat Turner did – do, in fact, exist in the United Snakes.
Black prisoners and captives across the country were and are being targeted for adhering to the New African ideology on the basis that the belief system originated with the Black Guerilla Family and/or George Jackson when in fact it existed prior to the BGF and George Jackson just as proven in court. Why isn’t this, white males’ arbitrary ideas and definitions, as regards our people’s historical experiences, not blatant evidence of white supremacist arrogance?
As far as the enemy is concerned, until this day, Black people don’t have the right to hate those whom show us profound hatred, generation after generation. Black fools would have us “love thy enemies” while being consumed by genocidal methods rooted in white supremacy, just as were the Jews of Nazi Germany. Were the Jews told and expected to “Love thy enemies” while being marched to concentration death camps? It was our Nat Turners who were accused of being murderers, cruel and barbaric just as the Native Americans were called savages for daring to defy white supremacy and to organize Black folks to struggle for our freedom and against the f****** threat sandwich white people, northern and southern, represented to our lives!
Yet, as the white male power structure of yesterday would define and have matters, Black people fighting for their literal survival and basic human rights were “lawbreakers,” “troublemakers” etc. The same is true today! At any rate, what we must grasp is New African or so-called African American Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War – just as ancestors like Nat Turner did – do, in fact, exist in the United Snakes. Those who bravely gave crucial and unselfish sacrifices via the Civil Rights and Human Rights struggles in order to improve our communities and to protect these from systematic-based white supremacist policies and practices, policies and practices which caused, still are causing, death and sustained injuries, remain Behind Enemy Lines – just witness the Prison Industrial Racist Slave Complex!
As such, we must do everything within our power to demand the U.S. governments of this nation to recognize and free our genuine Freedom Fighters and those who fought to bring Justice to our people, e.g., Louis C. Powell, etc.
“In schools and National tributes, the March on Washington is now pictured as one of the most American events of the 20th century – the power of U.S. democracy made real in the quarter of a million people who gathered on the National Mall that day. In 1963, however, most Americans disapproved of it; Many Congressmen saw it as potentially seditious, and law enforcement from local police to the FBI monitored it intensively.
“The popular fable of the movement makes it seem like most decent people were in favor of the Movement. They were not. The Civil Rights Movement was deeply unpopular and most Americans did not support it. They thought it was going too far, that Movement activists were being too extreme. Some thought its goals were wrong; Others, that activists were going about it the wrong way. And most white Americans were content with the status quo. And so they criticized, monitored, demonized and at times criminalized those who challenged it, making dissent very costly.
“The author completely ignores one of the most significant and turbulent periods of political upheaval in the struggle for social justice in this country, the Black Liberation movement. And how the criminalization incarceration of Black dissidents was used prior to the War on Drugs to crush dissent and resistance, just as the War on Drugs now criminalizes an entire population, especially young people, using mass imprisonment to subvert the potential for politicization descent, resistance and building of a revolutionary youth-lead movement, both have caused the mass destruction of poor and working-class Black and Brown communities.” – Dequi Kioni-Sadiki, “We reserve the right to resist”: Prison Wars and Black Resistance. p. 90. November 2015.
With the above in mind, is anyone really surprised by the sudden and greatly expensive gang databases as well as Black and Brown youth being, especially on an intense level, targeted via monitoring, classified, designated and validated from America’s prisons to that of general society in the face of the 1992 L.A. rebellion?
“Nixon emphasized ‘That you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. We got to be tough on this you know what this is, the Angela Davis crowd involved … the Negroes.’”
No, the white power structure has absolutely no genuine qualms about Black and Brown young folks harming and killing each other since it ultimately serves their agenda and repressive program. However, when they observed young folks from our communities show unity and political resolve, that sounded the alarm!
In any event, I reiterate, it is a verifiable fact that there does exist African American prisoners, some of whom became political while in prison, who are and remain in prison for the mere fact of exercising their allegedly accorded constitutional human rights and or social and political freedoms.
Yes, that’s absolutely correct! For daring to resist white-based and motivated institutional racism, even from within Amerika’s prisons, which was and is responsible for causing grave harm and destruction to our communities, the U.S. government (local, state and national) targeted for attack certain Blacks, e.g., Rosa Parks, Sekou Odinga, Sundiata Acoli, Assata Shakur, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Russell Maroon Shoats, Robert F. Williams, Bunchy Carter, Elijah Muhammad, Paul Robeson, Fred Hampton Sr., Marcus Garvey, George Jackson etc., and Black organizations like the Black Panther Party, RAM, Nation of Islam, UNIA, United Slaves, SNCC, NAACP, CORE, SCLC, Republic of New Afrika etc.
Based on their social and political activities, i.e., it was, and ever is, the United States’ governments and their various fascist oriented and motivated law enforcement gangs, Security Threat Groups, towards our people’s interest across the board, as proven via their racist history, which always initiated and provoked all negative or violent encounters with Black individuals and organizations fighting for justice and freedom.
The same is equally true with regards to those prison guards (e.g. SSU, IGI, ISU etc.) who target(ed) Black prisoners who are simply motivated by a social and political consciousness in the “tombs of gloom and doom” of Amerikkka.
“Nixon emphasized ‘That you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. We got to be tough on this you know what this is, the Angela Davis crowd involved … the Negroes.’” – H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries, Ibid., p. 60-61.
And yet, as usual, New Afrikans such as myself are accused of refusing to assume full responsibility for our thinking and behavior while scum, i.e. the real “worst of the worst” like J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, prison wardens, complicit courts, district attorneys, superintendents, politicians, prison guards, law enforcement, the CIA, FBI etc., engage in all manner of criminal conduct and racist practices against Black people with impunity, with the damn aid of house n@#$%^&*. To be continued …
A’Jene
Send our brother some love and light: Joe A’Jene’ Valentine, C47779, Calipatria State Prison A4-225, P.O.Box 921, Imperial, CA 92251.
